Diary

Tom Nairn

On voting day I took the Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller’s window. It was good to see Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. [1] A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that’s not why it’s so popular here. The book sets out to display, often brutally, just what Robert Hughes’s ‘fatal shore’ has become: a terrain beset by identity dilemmas and querulous uncertainty. Who dunnit? Well, everybody, in one way or another. Temple’s Joe Cashin fights his way through gangsters and bent cops to reveal Melbourne as the capital of paedophilia, as well as of southern hemisphere organised crime. Down these mean tourist routes a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The battered policeman from Port Monro (a fictive place somewhere down Great Ocean Road) finds himself searching for an answer far beyond his culprit – and so do the readers, presumably.

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[1] Quercus, 352 pp., £6.99, March, 978 1 84724 044 6.

2 Canongate, 352 pp., £7.99, September 2006, 978 1 84195 828 6.

[3] Vintage, 528 pp., £8.99, June, 978 0 09 948 374 8.

[4] Published in Britain next March by Constable.

[5] Coercive Reconciliation edited by John Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Arena, 340 pp., A$27.50, October, 978 0 98041 580 3).

Vol. 29 No. 24 · 13 December 2007 » Tom Nairn » Diary (print version)
Pages 34-35 | 3018 words

Letters

From Ross McKibbin

I agree with much of what Tom Nairn has to say about the Australian elections (LRB, 13 December 2007). However, I do have some reservations about his treatment of the republic. Whether Rudd will raise the question again via a referendum or plebiscite I do not know, but it should be noted that when he took office he reverted to the ‘republican’ oath – i.e. there was no mention of the monarchy or of any loyalty to it. That was certainly a signal which many ignored. I also think Nairn misses the real significance of Howard’s attitude to the monarchy. No doubt there was a sentimental side to it but the Crown was not under him a way to preserve Anglo-Celtic Australia: it was a way to increase the authority of the prime minister and of the federal government. Howard’s behaviour was seemingly paradoxical. He was a supporter of the monarchy, yet no prime minister has treated his governors general (the Crown’s representatives in Australia) so casually as Howard. Certainly no Labour prime minister has. The present system in effect allows the prime minister to appoint (and dismiss) the head of state as s/he wishes. As a result the governors general under Howard (once the last Labour appointee, an outstanding figure, had retired) have been utterly marginalised both politically and ceremonially. Nearly all those functions were appropriated by the prime minister. What Howard did not want was a head of state with a clearly defined constitutional role since that could formally limit the power of the prime minister. Howard’s opposition to the republic must be seen in the context of the conservative parties’ abandonment of federalism in favour of an authoritative and authoritarian government in Canberra.

One last note. The prime minister and the minister for indigenous affairs did indeed both lose their seats, but that had nothing to do with federal intervention in the Northern Territory as Nairn seems to imply.

Ross McKibbin
Oxford

From Stephen Sasse

Tom Nairn describes the Australian Defence Force’s intervention in the indigenous communities of the Northern Territory as an ‘invasion’. That is simplistic, shallow and offensive. There are well documented instances of child abuse in the north, including gang rapes, severe alcohol abuse and petrol sniffing; and infant mortality rates are comparable with those in the Third World. Nairn fails to mention that it’s the state and territory governments that are primarily responsible for the management of these issues; and he fails to mention the bipartisan political support for the military intervention.

Stephen Sasse
Killara, New South Wales