My Take: I have a very warm spot in my heart for David Malouf. He’s the kind of writer that I would love to be – a poet who divides his time between writing classical allegories set in the Roman Empire and stories of humid days and stormy nights spent on the decks of Queenslander houses. He’s living proof that “Queensland literary giant” is no oxymoron and as such I cling to him dearly.

“Johnno” isn’t Malouf’s best work (I’ll plump for the Miles Franklin winning The Great World in this respect), but as a fellow Queenslander, it is my favourite. No other book I’ve read quite evokes the experiences and outlook of the Great Northern State quite like Malouf’s first book, “Johnno”. While the Brisbane City Council may not usually be recognised as a noted judge of literary achievement, its recent selection of “Johnno” as the book that best represents Brisbane was spot on.

While quite short and simply written, “Johnno” is a complex and layered book. In a funny way, “Johnno” is part Hugh Lunn, part Aeschylus. At the most basic level, it is a lovingly told coming of age story of two unlikely friends in 1940s and 50s Brisbane. Thematically however, Malouf piles many layers of meaning into this work. I’m no literary expert, but to my mind the most interesting part of this book is how Malouf uses the evolving relationship between the urbane but insecure auto-biographical protagonist, ‘Dante’ and his hedonistic and superficially assured best friend Johnno as a platform for exploring Malouf’s evolving perceptions of place and family.

On the one hand, throughout his youth Dante/Malouf envies Johnno’s bravura and seemingly blissfully relaxed approach to life. While he feels like an outsider, Dante/Malouf genuinely wants to fit into the simple, happy, physical lifestyle in Brisbane that his father long enjoyed. On the other hand, Dante/Malouf is repelled by Johnno’s lack of refinement and ambition. Dante/Malouf sees himself as ultimately being apart from Brisbane, an intellectual and sophisticate with broader horizons and ambitions than other Queenslanders.

Unfortunately, as a young man, Dante/Malouf invariably failed to see that his perceptions of Johnno/his father/Brisbane were more a function of his insecurity than their shallowness. Throughout the majority of the novel Dante/Malouf views Johnno/his father/Brisbane in black and white. As a result he feels the need to reject what he feels Johnno/his father/Brisbane stand for in order to validate his own, broader intellectual ambitions.

In this regard, Dante/Malouf’s strident complaints about Brisbane ring true to anyone who grew up there:

‘I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.’

‘Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.’

However, the fact that these complaints are so familiar directly undermine any justification for Dante/Malouf’s sense of separateness.  Dante/Malouf was never as isolated and stifled in Brisbane as he thought as a young man. Many of those around him who he had written off as dully shallow and suburban had similar rich internal lives and ambitions. However, it is only when looking back with the benefit of age and the perspective of having lived in Paris, Italy and London that Malouf is able to realise that Johnno/his father/Brisbane were far more nuanced and complex than he had given them credit for.

Malouf has a real talent for bringing out these realisations in the most affecting ways. In one of the saddest moments of the book, Johnno’s last letter to Dante before his suicide reveals that he had always admired the intellectual qualities in Dante that he had thought Johnno had misunderstood, describing him as:

‘the most exotic creature — so strange and untouchable. Like a foreign prince’.

Similarly, when sorting through his father’s belongings soon after his death, Dante is forced to similarly revaluate his perceptions of his Father:

‘Now as I began to sort through his “effects” it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.’

In this way, I think “Johnno” is a story about what all Queenslanders go through at some point in their lives – the process of revaluating the black and white judgements of their youth about the place in which they grew up. “Johnno” is about the process of leaning that while Queensland is far from the most cosmopolitan place in the world, neither is it a cultural backwater devoid of the human experience. Life might still seem impossibly boring there, but it’s ultimately the people that make a place what it is. If you make the effort to look below the surface, you’ll see that the people of Queensland are just as complex and nuanced participants in the human experience as anyone else. It might not make you feel as special or unique to admit it, but it opens up a world of enriching relationships that might never have realised existed.

Highlights:

‘Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.’

….

‘The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.’

Synopsis:

My Take: The way I remember it (and it could have course been completely different for everyone else), the mid-90s were a strangely depressing time. The Cold War was over, but instead of celebrating the lifting of this looming an existential threat, the Western world seemed to fall into a crisis of meaning. At a time when academics were proclaiming ‘The End of History’, people seemed to start asking “What’s the point?”. The great political and ideological struggles seemed to have been fought and people were left to contemplate a boring life spent climbing the corporate ladder. Personal angst flowed into the void created be the removal of political tension. This vibe seemed to change with the arrival of a new existential/ideological challenge in the form of the Global War on Terror, but there was a brief window when cynicism and resignation seemed to pervade the public mind.

To me, “The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming” felt like it was written in the middle of this mid-90s funk. The themes of the book – soulless corporatism and hollow relationships – combined with its method of delivery – a brooding internal monologue – gave the book a bleak feel that just didn’t speak to me. The writing’s not bad (if a little monotonous at times) but it just seemed unnecessarily bleak to me. Maybe this book would have connected with me more when it was written, but the crisis of meaning that seemed to underpin the stories just didn’t seem relevant to me today.

Highlights:

‘Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalised and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.’

…

‘Why did I start with them? Why do any of us choose one company over another as an employer? The money? At the beginning they all offer more or less the same and no one know how it will go after that. I guess it is often not so much your prospects at a particular firm, because these are essentially unknowable, but whether people will think you have done well to get the job there, that determines you choice. That was largely it in my case. It was really the prestige. They gave good letterhead.’

Synopsis:

My Take: I had a typically ‘old Australia’ childhood in country Queensland. Cricket, football, fishing, “Australia All Over” with Macca on a Sunday morning. It was great fun, but it wasn’t exactly a melting pot of cultural diversity. The pictures of the Queen of England in the school assembly hall didn’t really count as multi-culturalism in my book.

Since moving to Melbourne after university of course, things changed dramatically. It wasn’t long before my friendship group was teeming with those permanent fixtures of Collins St corporate law firms; over-achieving first generation Asian-Australians.  In addition to dramatically improving my access to quality Yum Cha, I also managed to pick up a fiancée in the process so I feel like I’ve done pretty well from this cultural enlightenment.

So understandably, I was favourably inclined to enjoying Alice Pung’s ‘Unpolished Gem’. It had been recommended to me by a few of my Asian-Australian friends as strongly reflecting their own experiences of growing up in Australia and I was keen for an insight into a childhood experience that was very different to my own. They were right, it’s a lovely read.

Pung tells her family’s story with an elegant simplicity. Ironically enough for someone who’s edited a collection of stories titled “Growing up Asian in Australia”, I think Pung has a distinctly ‘old’ Australian voice – self-deprecating, laconic and matter of fact.  Her writing is both observant and insightful without being introspective or overwrought.

The strength of this book is in the details. The book is packed with endearing little observations of immigrant life. I particularly liked I love how her family “wah”s at the prosperity in Australia and how her grandmother referred to Centrelink reverentially as “Father Government… like Father Christmas, as if he is a tangible benign white-bearded guru”. Equally amusing was her parents desire for her to study at “Mao-Bin U”. ‘Their pronunciation made the place sound like a shonky university in China for discarded communists.’

At times, Pung’s story is genuinely sad. The pressures on a young Chinese girl, whether growing up in Australia or in Asia, are not insignificant. Similarly, the strains on mother-daughter-grandmother relations of not just a generation gap, but also a growing cultural gulf are a source of much family tension. At times I just want to wrap her up and say “It’s all going to be ok! You’ll survive and even better- Eurasian kids are going to be the coolest people in the next generation”

Highlight:

My father’s idea of getting familiar with someone was to tell them war stories. He didn’t do it to sober them up or edify them. He did it to crack them up.

“This fish reminds me of the Pol Pot years when the starved, dead bodies floated up the river during the flood. I got the job of dragging them to higher, dryer land. We wrapped them up in a dry blanket and me and my mate grabbed on to each end. Every time we tripped, the blanket would get water-soaked and even heavier. Hah hah, so funny! And listen to this – my mate turns to me and says, “Hope you’re not going to be this heavy when it’s time for me to drag you”, and I say to him, “What do you mean when you drag me? I’m going to be the poor soul who will be dragging you!””

He finished by exhorting his guests to eat more fish.

My Take: Sigh. I guess it is an inevitable part of getting older to be confronted with the increasingly spectacular public successes of people who were formerly anonymously moving in your peer group. Like Nam Le, I used to be a corporate lawyer in Melbourne. I used to work for a law firm in the Rialto. In fact the law firm that I worked for was on a higher floor than Nam Le’s. So why haven’t I published a subtle, perceptive and critically acclaimed collection of short stories? Why aren’t I uniquely talented and motivated?? Sigh.

Anyway, my own petty jealousies aside, Nam Le is the real deal. While superficially, there are no obvious common threads between the short-stories in “The Boat”, at their core, each of the stories shares some extremely perceptive characterisation. Le is a subtle writer and explores the nuances of his characters impressively in such short stories. While I thought some of his stories were slightly over-long for what they were, in general this didn’t bother me as I appreciated Le’s obsessive attention to his characters. I’m really looking forward to seeing Le employ this talent in a full length novel.

While Le has honourably tried to cast off the limitations of ‘ethnic lit’ by setting his stories across the cultures of six continents, I enjoyed the two stories that he wrote from a Vietnamese-Australian perspective the best. This is no criticism of the other works in this collection, but the emotional intensity of the subjects closer to his own experience dramatically outshone that of his extra-cultural explorations.

A good example of this is the first story in the book “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” (Substantially extracted here). This opening missive tells the story of an aspiring Vietnamese-Australian writer at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop hosting a visit from his father while trying to finalise an important piece of assessment (some not to subtle parallels to Le’s own life here!). In a few short pages the story movingly explores concepts as complex and diverse as father-son relationships, the trauma of memory and the role of ethnicity in literature. It’s a masterpiece and obviously a topic that is close to home for Le.

Based on what I’ve seen in “The Boat”, I really I hope that Le doesn’t restrict himself from writing about his own cultural experiences. You get the feeling from reading “The Boat” that Le sees mining his own background as a bit of a literary cop out or the intellectual low road. Further, Le clearly shows in “The Boat” that he’s talented enough to write convincingly about characters in any cultural setting. But Le shows a real virtuosity when delving into the nuances of Vietnamese-Australian characters that it would be a tragedy to waste. Many great writers have mined the rich vein of their distinctive cultural backgrounds (Marquez, Mistry, Ha Jin, Achebe) not simply because it was the path of least resistance, but because it was a rich and interesting emotional resource. I hope that the natural instinct of an over-achiever to shine at the most difficult of tasks doesn’t distract Le from his talent for writing about topics closer to home in the future.

Highlight:

We had just come from a party following a reading by the workshop’s most recent success, a Chinese woman trying to immigrate to America who had written a book of short stories about Chinese characters in stages of immigration to America. The stories were subtle and good. The gossip was that she’d been offered a substantial six-figure contract for a two-book deal. It was meant to be an unspoken rule that such things were left unspoken. Of course, it was all anyone talked about.

“It’s hot,” a writing instructor told me at a bar. “Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.”

A couple of visiting literary agents took a similar view: “There’s a lot of polished writing around,” one of them said. “You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out?” She tagteamed to her colleague, who answered slowly as though intoning a mantra, ‘Your background and life experience.’

Other friends were more forthright: “I’m sick of ethnic lit,” one said. “It’s full of descriptions of exotic food.” Or: “You can’t tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn’t have the vocab.”

I was told about a friend of a friend, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had posed in traditional Nigerian garb for his book-jacket photo. I pictured myself standing in a rice paddy, wearing a straw conical hat. Then I pictured my father in the same field, wearing his threadbare fatigues, young and hard-eyed.

“It’s a license to bore,” my friend said. We were drunk and walking our bikes because both of us, separately, had punctured our tires on the way to the party.

“The characters are always flat, generic. As long as a Chinese writer writes about Chinese people, or a Peruvian writer about Peruvians, or a Russian writer about Russians …” he said, as though reciting children’s doggerel, then stopped, losing his train of thought. His mouth turned up into a doubtful grin. I could tell he was angry about something.

“Look,” I said, pointing at a floodlit porch ahead of us. “Those guys have guns.”

“As long as there’s an interesting image or metaphor once in every this much text” — he held out his thumb and forefinger to indicate half a page, his bike wobbling all over the sidewalk. I nodded to him, and then I nodded to one of the guys on the porch, who nodded back. The other guy waved us through with his faux-wood air rifle. A car with its headlights on was idling in the driveway, and girls’ voices emerged from inside, squealing, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

“Faulkner, you know,” my friend said over the squeals, “he said we should write about the old verities. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” A sudden sharp crack behind us, like the striking of a giant typewriter hammer, followed by some muffled shrieks. “I know I’m a bad person for saying this,” my friend said, “but that’s why I don’t mind your work, Nam. Because you could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time. Like in your third story.”

He must have thought my head was bowed in modesty, but in fact I was figuring out whether I’d just been shot in the back of the thigh. I’d felt a distinct sting. The pellet might have ricocheted off something.

“You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans — and New York painters with hemorrhoids.”

My Take: “The Slap” is clearly a very special book. As the editor of The Australian Literary Review, Stephen Romei, has noted, the book has realised:

“a rare quadrella in publishing: it’s a page turner that sells lots of copies, gets great reviews and wins literary awards”.

In short, everyone loves it. And so do I. In fact, I loved this book so much that I was even disappointed to see it lose out to my favourite author for this year’s Miles Franklin Award.

“The Slap” is a brilliantly characterised book. Tsiolkas tells his story of the repercussions of the eponymous slap from the perspectives of eight vastly different, but very keenly observed characters. A middle aged, second-generation Greek Australian and his second-generation Indian Australian wife, a young, gay teenage boy, an orphaned teenage girl, an immigrant Greek grandfather, an unmarried Jewish soap-writer, a struggling, young mother with an alcoholic husband and a wealthy second generation Greek father.  Tsiolkas speaks with an equally authentic voice from the perspective of each of these characters – an extremely dexterous piece of authorship.

Tsiolkas’ characters are not only ring true, but they are representative of the truth of the inhabitants of Australia’s suburbs – a rich and complex mix, far from the homogenous middle-class drones of lazy caricature. In this regard, I particularly liked Reeling and Writhing’s description of the book as

a satanic version of Neighbours … swapping most of the Anglos for their real northern (and increasingly eastern, western and southern) suburbs neighbours.

One thing that has irritated me about the book though is the reviews. Many of the reviews of “The Slap” seem to fixate on the book being a critique of ‘modern suburban Australia’ or ‘Late Howard-era Australia’ as though this was some subject desperately needing critical deconstruction.  For instance, the Readings review states that the book “condemns Melbourne’s middle class” by highlighting the fact that “its acute mediocrity is vastly outweighed by the depths of its anger and frustrations”. Other reviews similarly argue that the book is ‘angry’ and ‘yelling.. in general frustration’ about the state of suburban Australia.

I’m not trying to swim against the stream here, I loved “The Slap” like everyone else, but I just didn’t see this at all in this book.  I think “The Slap” is very honest, keenly observed and frames its moral questions well (in particular loyalties to family, friends, culture etc) but I think people who read this as a screed against suburban life are projecting onto this. The anti-suburbs take is a lazy and simplistic analysis that doesn’t do the book justice.  My take was that the book was on the whole quite sympathetic to the characters and quite non-judgemental about the foibles and failures of the characters. I didn’t think it exposed immoral hypocrisy, just a valueless and often overlooked complexity in people’s lives – even suburban lives.

I take this view despite the fact that from what I’ve seen, even the author of “The Slap” would probably agree that the book embodies a critique of suburban values (even if I suspect he would disagree with some of the more simplistic critiques). I get the feeling that Tsiolkas would like to offer a generalised critique of some form of broader suburban values, but his skill as an observer of characters won’t let him. You can see this tension in a fantastic interview with Tsiolkas at Literary Minded where the author notes:

It is too simplistic and facile to place all that is unsettling or ugly or uncomfortable in contemporary Australia on John Howard’s shoulders and not to see the continuity in politics and practices between Keating, Howard and Rudd, for example. It seemed to me that a significant change occurred in Australian society over the last twenty years that has seen a withering away of traditional notions of Australian class and of a supposed ethos of egalitarianism. That was a very conscious decision to set the novel in the backyards and bars and coffee shops of a new middle-class which does not necessarily look or sound anything like the middle-class that usually inhabits the pages of Australian fiction or is on our cinema and television screens. This is a middle-class as much wog as it is anglo, a middle-class that emerges as much from the working class as it does from the world of universities and the eastern suburbs. This shift in the cultural landscape of urban Australia is about money, the global economic boom of the nineties and early twenty-first century, and because it is about capital and status the values embodied in this shift are conservative and materialistic.

While Tsiolkas argues that ‘money’ has caused a shift in contemporary Australian values away from egalitarianism and in favour of materialism, in almost all cases, the character’s reactions to the seminal Slap are driven by their personal, cultural, familial and fraternal histories. They are driven by their (differing) affiliations and obligations rather than aspirations.

Ultimately, I think Tsiolkas better describes the underlying theme of the book in the same Literary Minded interview when he states that:

What I hope is that a reader of The Slap comes away trying to understand some of this complexity, whether it comes to questions of race and culture, to questions of gender and sex, or to attitudes to younger or older generations. But you can’t lead a reader to any conclusion. Again that comes down to a question of trust, a trust that I believe is crucial: a faith that the reader of your work is intelligent, questioning, an ethical human being.

Tsiolkas definitely does trust his readers and allows them to come to their own conclusions about the novel in a warmly open manner. Ironically, readers that really do ruminate on the messages of the novel might even reach a different conclusion than he seems to have done.

Highlight:

Hugo pulled away from Rosie’s teat. ‘No one is allowed to touch my body without my permission.’ His voice was shrill and confident. Hector wondered where he learnt those words. From Rosie? At child care? Were they community announcements on the frigging television?

Synopsis:

My Take: Published in 1990, this collection of Keating quotations comes from the golden era of PJK. The period before he became PM and was forced to moderate (at least to some extent) his more extreme instincts for public, rhetorical bloodshed.

Most of the more well known Keatingisms are collected at the excellent Scumbag Archive, so I’ll refrain from republishing them here. But there are plenty of less well known, but equally amusing Keating sprays that I can’t see anywhere online at presemt so I’ll include a selection of the better ones from this book below:

On the Left:

“What it boils down to is wider nature strips, more trees and we’ll all make wicker baskets in Balmain. Then we’ll all live in renovated terraces in Balmain and we’ll have the arts and crafts shops and everything else is bad and evil.”

“These people are trying to make my party into something other than it is… They’re appendages. That’s why I’ll never abandon ship, and never let those people capture it.”

On the economy:

“If we were providing these policy setting and outcomes in Western Europe, they’d be lighting candles to us in the cathedrals.”

“I guarantee if you walk into any pet shop in Australia what the resident galah will be talking about it micro-economic policy.”

“Stick your head out of the building in any capital city in Australia and it’s a sea of cranes. The economy is so robust that it’s taken a pickaxe to stop it. We’re laying into it with a lump of four-by-two to try and slow it down. In the past, if you hit it with a lump of four-by-two, it would fall to bits. And stay in bits.”

“All these ex-Treasury drop-outs around the place advising me how we ought to best do things – the fact is, look, all these people whould be better off in the Australian Treasury. We’ve lost years of experience. They have dropped out to write a bloody newsletter for some merchant bank. It’s pointless and useless.”

On failing to lodge his tax return:

“My fortunes are tied up with the economy.. I’m still on the big picture, painting the big picture, and I may splash a bit of paint. I did make a mistake, but unlike the Leader of the Opposition, my mistake did not cost half a million people their jobs. My mistake did not retard the economy for twenty years. My mistake did not introduce a massive domestic recession, unlike his mistake which almost destroyed the fabric of the Australian economy.”

On the Aussie battler:

“These people, they live on the ebb and flow of the economy, like kelp on the seashore. They can’t protect, they don’t have the personal wealth to protect themselves from the ups and downs of the economy. We’ve got to protect them.”

On Whitlam:

“It was a contest as to whether the heart on the sleeve outweighed the chip on the shoulder. There was certainly a shortage of cerebral ballast to maintain any equilibrium.”

On the Opposition:

“You were heard in silence, so some of you scumbags on the front bench should just wait a minute until you hear the responses from me.”

“You were in office from 1949 to 1983 bar three years…. And you left everything the way you found it. The place got old and tired and worn out, just like you are… For 30 years all we had was Black Jack McEwen trowelling on the tarrif protection while he was kidding farmers he was representing them. And Liberal Part Treasueres, handed speeches by Treasury officials… they couldn’t even read the speeches, let alone comprehend the stuff. That’s how you ran the Commonwealth. The mandarins ran things… you wouldn’t worry about the detail. Because you NEVER ran the policy. You never RAN the place. We run the departments, we run the policy. We comprehend. We know.”

On journalists:

“At least we’re doing it for the history books – you’re doing it for tomorrow’s fish and chips.”

On politics:

“It’s the great vista of politics that is so appealing. You know, a finger in every pie. You’re always certain of your own motivation even if you’re never quite sure of anybody else’s. So if it’s a case of backing in somebody to do a job you might as well back in yourself.”

“You know me luv, downhill, one ski, no poles.”

“We’re all stressed. The game I’m in is lubricated by stress. Politics is the clearing house of pressures.”

“If you want to wear the belt, you’ve got to have the fights. And if you won’t have the fights, you’ll have the belt taken off you.”

“We are all given the field-marshall’s baton in the knapsack when we get our pre-selection. I got mine then and it is still tucked away” [1988]

From 1986, more prescient than he would have intended:

“I could burn inflation out of the economy with a recession, but I would burn the economy with it.”

On Architecture and Design:

“After art deco there’s only fag packets and bottle tops.”

“Other people play the neddies – I perv on buildings.”

“The Labor Party is the only repository of taste in Australian politics. Most of these Tories, like Fraser, have a knowledge of architecture and design that goes no further than wedding-cake Victoriana and grandfather chairs.”

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s mock Chippendale.”

On Modesty in 1987

Keating: This is the great coming of age of Australia. This is the golden age of economic change.

Interviewer: How much credit do you take?

Keating: Oh, a very large part.

And two for our times:

“You don’t have to be a genius – if the private economy is rooted, then we haven’t got much of a chance.”

“Banking is the artery of the economy and we’ve had hardening of the arteries for too long in this country.”

Synopsis:

My Take: Much like Joh himself, there’s nothing fancy to this book, just a collection of The Flying Peanut’s more memorable quotes. It did give me some pleasure transcribing these quotes into the blogosphere. While Google is doing a good job of making everything ever written searchable through Google Books, there’s a bit of an online void at the moment once you go looking for the esoterica of Australian politics beyond about a decade ago. So far as I can see, this is the only place online that many of these quotes currently appear – so enjoy. Especially the non-Queenslanders – you don’t know what you missed:

On Aboriginals:

• “Land rights is a communist plot to set up land bases that could be used for subversive activities by other countries as well as for guerrilla training centres for other countries.”
• “Aborigines are as wealthy as Arab oil sheiks…. They wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the United States of America, together with our people, who fought the Coral Sea battle.”

On Morals:

• “Queensland will not be dragged into the condom culture”
• “There is no animal, no beast on this earth that resorts to the sort of tactics that these characters [homosexuals] do. And I think that it is disgusting that they offer to give their blood and cause the death of so many people.”
• “The day care concept, boiled down, means leaving you child with someone else to bring up while you do what you like – go to work, learn pottery etc.”
• “No Goannas, No Gays”

On Queensland:

• “We are a federation and I support a federation but we would operate much more effectively and efficiently and really surge ahead if we were on our own.”
• “We will work with [Bob Hawke] provided he is working in Queensland’s interests. If he attempts to interfere in any shape or form, then it’s on his head. And if he’s so unsure of himself and so far committed to the communists around his shoulders and breathing down his neck, then God help Australia.”
• “What is good for Queensland is good for Australia.”
• “I don’t mind being called the Flying Peanut. I think this is unique: in each of the three Government aircraft, we’ve gone more than the distance from here to the moon.”
• “I really worry about Queensland. I lose a lot of sleep because I don’t know what will happen when I go.”

On Policy:

• “The Great Barrier Reef is really big. The people who say it’s being ruined don’t know how big it is.”
• “We won’t be able to sit on uranium. Firstly because it would not be right and secondly because it would be wrong.”
• “I oppose tobacco tax on principle. It is a new tax and Queensland does not have new taxes.”
• “If I had been building the dam and they had ordered me to stop the dam, do you think I would have stopped it, just because some guy in Canberra or somewhere else said it was unconstitutional?”

On other cultures:

• “Just because a few migrants want their spicy tucker, I fail to see what the Australian community as a whole should suffer the possibility of foot-and-mouth disease.”

Dealing with the Press:

• “I’d love to tell you but I can’t. Just look at me. Don’t you worry about that until tomorrow, goodness me.”
• “I’m not talking to you on what you want to talk… Well I’m not interested in anything you say. You’re always so wide of the mark and generally so critical so I won’t even bother answering what you’ve got to say. Anybody else?”
• “Don’t you worry about it, we are looking after it”
• On being asked a question on condoms by a reporter: “Let’s come clean, Elizabeth. I thought you looked a decent sort of girl. You don’t mean to tell me that you are in that category also? What’s your lifestyle Elizabeth? What do you really think? Do you really think this is the way for the nation to go? We are being asked to say ‘you go ahead and play around, the Government will help you’?!
• “I’m not interested in that, or in anything anyone else says”
• “The greatest thin that could happen to the State and the nation is when we can get rid of the media. Then we can live in peace and tranquillity and no one would know anything.”
• “You don’t tell the frogs anything before you drain the swamp.”

My Take: This book deserves to be a classic of Australian literature.  Tense plotting, an exotic setting and some deeply intriguing characters make for a thoroughly engrossing read. However, despite the political intrigue, the real heart of this book comes in the form the moral prodding of the protagonist’s Chinese-Australian, dwarf cameraman, Billy Kwan.

Billy is a complex character (bizarely the movie version included the female Linda Hunt winning an Oscar for playing the male Billy Kwan). Culturally straddling Asia and the West while belonging to neither, Billy is further excluded from full social (particularly romantic) acceptance because of his physical limitations.  Kwan feels this isolation acutely and in this regard is the perfect outsider to prod the main characters from their moral comfort zones. His occupation as a cameraman is clearly highly symbolic – an observer documenting the moral choices of the actors.

The primary question that Billy poses to those around him how they ought to respond to inequity. Billy frequently muses on the moral difference between a political response to poverty and a personal response. The tension is highlighted in this key exchange between Billy, and the novel’s protagonist, ABC foreign correspondent, Guy Hamilton:

BILLY: And the people asked him, saying, what then, shall we do?

GUY: What’s that?

BILLY: It’s from Luke, chapter three, verse ten. What then must we do?

Tolstoy asked the same question. He wrote a book with that title. He got so upset about the poverty in Moscow that he went one night into the poorest section and just gave away all his money.

You could do that now. Five American dollars would be a fortune to one of these people.

GUY: Wouldn’t do any good, just be a drop in the ocean.

BILLY: Ahh, that’s the same conclusion Tolstoy came to. I disagree.

GUY: Oh, what’s your solution?

BILLY: Well, I support the view that you just don’t think about the major issues. You do whatever you can about the misery that’s in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light. You think that’s naive, don’t you?

GUY: Yep.

Unsurprisingly, as someone who works in politics, I have to side with Guy on this moral question. The reason that I work in politics is because I believe in the potential for political actors to affect macro-changes to the life circumstances of the vulnerable. I’ve always viewed ‘thinking about the issues’ and acting on this basis through the political sphere as more productive than taking direct, individual action to help the less fortunate.

However, I can see that this is a deeply utilitarian view of moral obligation – it’s certainly not for everyone. And that’s why I love Billy’s questioning in this book – it forces you to reflect on your own moral world view. In fact, I was emailing a friend of mine with religious faith about this exchange a while ago and she gave a very different view:

I interpret the scripture (quoted by Billy) to mean that I will be held to account for the times when I didn’t show compassion to each individual God had specifically brought across my path to help. To show compassion to such individuals may make little difference in the grand scheme of things.  However, it means a lot to God.

Why? Firstly, because he cares about every human being that I come into contact with, and he needs me to convey His love, care and concern for them through human action.

Secondly, it is a way for me to express my love to God. Will I always respond in the way that He wants me to?  No. Why? Because I’m human and not perfect.  However, that shouldn’t stop me from aspiring to do as God pleases.

Given that I’m not a person of faith, it begs the question somewhat from my perspective. It’s fine to ask ‘What then shall we do?’ – so long as you don’t answer on other people’s behalf.

Highlight: Billy Kwan asking “What then shall we do?” certainly stayed with me long after I had finished this book.