Sarah Burnside reviews new books by Bill and Jenny Bunbury and Don Watson, and a much less new one by Aileen Moreton-Robinson.

Sarah Burnside reviews new books by Penny Wincer and Ambelin Kwaymullina and a new essay by Judith Brett, with a focus on care.

These are strange and frightening times, and settling down to read nonfiction on subjects far removed from the COVID19 pandemic feels vaguely incongruous. However, books also help to fill what Evelyn Araluen terms the ‘deafening silence of quarantine’. In this age of #staythefuckathome, sharp anxiety and comfortable trousers, the following come recommended.

If you have ever sought a book about the rise and consequences of capitalism that is both deeply, morally serious and a rollicking good read, then search no more. This narrative’s truly global sweep is a welcome antidote to triumphalist, anglocentric tales of the Protestant work ethic and suchlike, and the central argument about the role of nature in human economic activity is persuasive.

It’s difficult to believe that Australia used to be such a country – a place where, in 1979, the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised against a Labor proposal for temporary camps for boat arrivals on the basis that such camps would discriminate between refugees who only managed to reach South-East Asia, and those who had the ‘perseverance and courage’ to make it all the way here.

These literary essays circle tightly around postpartum depression, but also explore themes including violence against women, art, writing and death. The strongest pieces are those that cut closest to the bone, making the reader witness to the author’s frankness.

I picked up The Honest History Book during the first wave of concerted right-wing attacks on Yassmin Abdel-Magied for her seven-word facebook post on Anzac Day, and its measured and analytical essays came as a welcome relief. The book traces the strange story of how a devastating global conflict became so central to Australian nationalism when, as Douglas Newton observes, ‘the Great War should rattle our souls, not rouse our national self-esteem’.

In A handful of sand, Charlie Ward goes beyond photogenic myth to tell a harder story about this famous land rights battle. It’s a tale of the hollowness of political promises, clashes between different levels of government, white ‘helpers’ of varying degrees of assiduousness, and differences of opinion between younger and older Gurindji about the kind of future they wanted to build.

His focus is on people who live and work here, who pay taxes and are subject to our laws, but who are not citizens and cannot vote: international students, New Zealanders, backpackers on working holiday visas, asylum seekers and refugees, the holders of 457 visas. This detailed, careful and topical book is illuminated by the personal stories of individuals and families caught up in a complex and bureaucratic system, and it leaves a lasting impression of an Australia that is becoming a two-tiered country.

Answers to eternal questions about man’s inhumanity to man remain elusive, but the simple truths burn.

Any Australian wanting to make the case that the right prefers fairytales to science, reason and logic will not lack raw material. This story merits some unpicking, but what is rather extraordinary is that the Abbott and Turnbull governments have seemed intent on proving it to be true. The casual observer could be excused for concluding that the Coalition harboured some deep-seated grudge against the sciences, as though somehow, at a formative age, someone in a lab coat wielding a Bunsen burner had hurt the government’s collective feelings and it had never truly recovered.

All sorts of things can happen to you when you’re pregnant; there are stories of women losing hair, teeth, balance. For my part, I lost my words: I was hit with a comprehensive case of writer’s block.

In a piece for Griffith Review’s recent edition on ‘Fixing the System’, Gabrielle Carey muses that Australia does not have a strong essayist tradition, and suggests that our ‘zealous commitment to egalitarianism’ might play a role, noting that ‘[i]f all people and opinions are equal, then there is no room for giving authority to a person or allowing them to lead the conversation’. This is an interesting theory, but I’m not sure about it.

The app has received some criticism for ‘policing’ women’s speech, although other critiques could be made. For mine, knowing your limitations is an asset rather than a setback, and accordingly the words ‘I’m no expert’ could stand to be used more often. In addition, the phrases singled out above seem to be a way of putting a recipient at their ease; hardly the worst sin to commit in an email.

This inconsistency is a little uncomfortable to discuss for feminists on the left, who favour a movement which places more emphasis on issues such as poverty, precarity, racism and inequality than on concerns primarily affecting middle-class women. Media-friendly feminism has often been tone-deaf or worse on issues of class or race, and this tendency can be seen in a constant emphasis on the need for affordable childcare to assist mothers to return to work – an emphasis which often entirely overlooks the pay and conditions of the mostly women who work in the childcare sector.

The Perth Writers Festival was characterised not only by a joy at reading and creative endeavour, but also by anxieties about, firstly, the perennial theme of what-Australia-is, and secondly, humanity's uncertain future.

To write for publication, even casually, is to absorb a specific new set of words and phrases: a kind of specialised jargon. Writing about writing is an increasingly large genre of its own, one which includes important discussions about paying the writers.

Australia’s political parties have been dipping cautious toes in online culture of late. In addition to the Palmer United Party’s retro ‘leave Clive alone’ attempt the other week, Labor released a pamphlet that made valid points about the federal government’s attacks on students and the young but awkwardly used the ‘one does not simply…’ meme in doing so. In any event, they’re rather late to the party – google ‘Tony Abbott memes’ and you’re hit with a flood.

Perth is known as the most geographically isolated capital city, but the place has also been less flatteringly captioned: it is seen as something of an intellectual paddling pool, attracting sobriquets of ‘provincial backwater’ and ‘cultural wasteland’. Watching events in Sydney and Melbourne unfold in live time via Twitter is sometimes apt to induce pangs of envy.

It is a common lament that the internet is devouring our civic institutions whole, with the apathetic inhabitants of wealthy nations have largely deserted the real world, instead immersing ourselves in isolated online domains to pass our time fruitlessly liking, clicking and sharing. These grim verdicts have spawned their own subgenre of despairing op-eds.

The mantra of self-esteem is everywhere these days. So Helen Razer’s recent diagnosis of a widespread tendency to write ‘as though the “right” to “feel beautiful” were something endorsed by John Locke and on a par with reproductive autonomy’ has real force. Consider Target’s current marketing slogan, ‘Every Australian has the right to look good and feel good about the way they dress and live’, which debases the language of human rights by commoditising it.

Who owns Australia’s minerals?

In his 2010 defence of the welfare state, Ill Fares the Land, the late historian Tony Judt argued that in the gradual erosion of social democracy, much that was precious had been lost. ‘Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today’, he wrote. ‘We cannot go on living like this’. Yet Judt acknowledged the more problematic side of l’état providence: a smothering desire to use the power of the state to, in the words of the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, ‘protect people from themselves’.