Vol. 6 No. 1 January-February 1996 $5.00 Sutntner Harvests The selling of privatisation Jon Greenaway The selling out of the forests Juliette Hughes Reading in season Poetry by Ouyang Yu and Philip Harvey Fiction by·Christine Gillespie Down by the sea with Jim Davidsdon Singapore sling with Peter Pierce Plus reviews of Tom Keneally and Tim Flannery Volume 6 Number 1 January-February 1996 A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology CONTENTS 4 38 COMMENT FORTRESS SINGAPORE Peter Pierce is not beguiled by 'the best­ 7 run primary school on earth'. CAPITAL LETTER 40 8 POETRY PULP POLITICS The Male Prostitute's Soliloquy and Juliette Hughes looks at the politics A Man of Future Sp eaks A bout Love of forest policy and the greening of (p4l), by Ouyang Yu. Victorian Labor leader, John Brumby. Greater Interests, by Philip Harvey (p49 ). 15 42 ARCHIMEDES BOOKS David Braddon-Mitchell reviews Tim 16 Flannery's award-winning The Future LOOKING RIGHT IN BURMA Eaters; Bill Thornas looks at the The signs deceive, says Alan Nichols. photography of Olive Cotton (p44); 'What I saw in East Gerard Windsor sizes up Tom Keneally's Gippslands is a 18 memoir, Homebush Boy (p46); Jeremy THE RIGHTS PRICE Clarke investigates Nick Jose's Chinese disaster in tenns of Australia doesn't match deeds to rhetoric Whispers (p4 7); Gillian Appleton looks argues Moira Rayner. at twenty years of feminism on the ABC forest practice.· in The Coming Out Show {p50); Michael 20 McKernan hands out medals to The - John Brumby, Victorian AT YOUR SERVICE Ox ford Companion to Australian Mili­ Labor Opposition Leader. Jon Greenaway on privatisation-the tary History (p52). See Pulp politics, pp8-15. pros, cons and protagonists. 51 23 IN MEMORIAM Cover: Summer pro menade on the SPARKY John Cotter remembers poet Gwen Es planade, St Kilda. Dan Disney ventures into viruses. Harwood. Postcards pp 1, 34-37 courtesy Ji m Davidson. 25 54 Photographs pp2, 3, 8- 11 , 42-43 by GENERATION X-CLUDED FIGURES ON STAGE Bill Thomas. Richard Curtain goes offshore for some Geoffrey Milne reviews arts funding. Photograph of Bill Thomas on p2 by solutions to youth unemployment. Jenny Herbft. Photographs p2 &5 by Emmanuel 56 Santos. 28 FLASH IN THE PAN Photograph p2 by Andrew Stark. TRIVIAL MATTERS Reviews of the films Golden Eye, Toy Photographs pp1 6- 17 by Greg Scullin. The great Eurel<a Street Summer Quiz. Story, Underground, The Broth ers Photograph p2 1 by Tim Stoney. Graphics pp20, 21, 24, 3 1, 33, 53, 54 McMullen, and Kids. by Siobhan Jackson. 30 Cartoons pp 27, 50 by Dean Moore. FICTION 58 Photographs pp38-39 by Peter Pierce. Peachy, by Christine Gillespie. WATCHING BRIEF Eureka Street m aga zine Jesuit Publications 34 59 PO Box 553 THE GALLOP TOWARDS THE SEA SPECIFIC LEVITY Richmond VI C 3 121 Tel (03 )9427 73 11 Jim Davidson takes a leisurely look at the Fax (03 ) 9428 4450 great Australian ozone addiction. V oLUME 6 N uMBER 1 • EUREKA STREET 3 COMMENT A magazine of public affairs, the arts P ETER STEELE and theology Publisher Michael Kelly SJ Editor Morag Fraser Consulting editor Star and Michael McGirr SJ Assistant editor Jon Greenaway Production assistants: labyrinth Paul Fyfe SJ, Juliette Hughes, Chris Jenkins SJ, Paul Ormonde, Tim Stoney, Siobhan Jackson, Dan Disney Contributing editors Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ C OME SUMMeR'" AumAUA, we ,u .ttond to" lmt Brisbane: Ian Howells SJ one star-that partly-bridled hydrogen bomb we call Sun. Perth: Dean Moore Nothing on Earth, good or ill, would be possible without it, Sydney: Edmund Campion, Andrew Riemer, and it is not surprising that it should, in many religions, be Gerard Windsor adored. No surprise either that a string of rulers, when more European correspondent: Damien Simonis than usually top-lofty, should invoke this interesting star. Louis XIV, Roi Soleil, did so: come to that, so did the six­ Editorial board inch Emperor of Lilliput, 'whose Head', by convention, Peter L'Estrangc SJ (chair), 'strikes against the Sun.' If life is, as one Australian comedian Margaret Coady, Margaret Coffey, puts it, 'something to do', Sun is something to see. Valda M. Ward RSM, Trevor Hales, Marie Joyce, Kevin McDonald, And what about the rest of them, immensely more size­ able than Sun, but hiding their light for the most part under Jane Kelly IBVM, P et~r Steele SJ, Bill Uren SJ the bushel of space? You may know as little as I do about them, but it is likely that they irradiate part of your Business manager: Sylvana Scannapiego consciousness. Hopkins' 'look at all the fire-folk sitting in Advertising representative: Ken Head the air' might leave the more measured of us cold: but what Patrons Eureka Street gratefully acknowledges the of Chesterton's dictum that 'One may understand the cos­ support of Colin and Angela Carter; the mos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; star', or of Flaubert's claim that 'Human language is like a Denis Cullity AO; W.P. & M.W. Gurry; cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance Geoff Hill and Janine Perrett; to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to the Roche family. pity'' Having the stars around the place 'influences' us: dead or alive, they pour themselves into our minds. Emelw Street magazine, rssN l 036- 1758, In the last few years there has been a notable array of Australia Post Print Post approved books on the history and functions of astrology: as usual, pp34918l/00314 the least condescending are the most intelligent. Some of is published ten times a year the most brilliant people the world has known were, in a by Eureka Street Magazine Pty Ltd, sense, starstruck, and it would take an implausible cocki­ 300 Victoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3121 ness to say of this no more than, 'we have changed all that'. Tel: 03 9427 73 11 Fax: 03 9428 4450. Responsibility fo r editorial content is accepted by I suppose that part of the imaginative vitality of the star of Michael Kelly, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond. Bethlehem, or of the Star of David, or even of communism's Prit1ted by Doran Printing, red star, lies in our latent conviction that we are drawn and 46 Industrial Drive, Braeside VlC 3 195. swayed by focused forces-that the 'tall ship' which each of © Jesuit Publications 1995. us is in some degree has 'a star to steer her by'. Unsolicited manuscripts, including poetry and When stellar issues arise, I like to think of two things. fiction, will be returned only if accompanied by a The first is that the International Geophysical Year, 1957- stamped, self-addressed envelope. Requests for 58, disclosed that possibly a hundred thousand tons of star­ permission to reprint material from the magazine dust is collected daily by our little planet- the one Howard should be addressed in writing to: Nemerov's imaginary astronaut sees from the moon as a The editor, Eureka Street magazine, 'small blue agate in the big black bag'. The second is the PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3 121. racket known as 'Star-Scam', wh ich was funded by those 4 EUREKA STREET • J ANUA RY-FEBRUARY 1996 nai:vely supposing that, for a significant sum of mon­ incorporated into the design of Chri tian churches, ey, some new star or other would be named after them . conceding thereby our boxed- about fortunes even The daily garnering of cosmic dust is a vivid while an over-arching Providence was being alluded What of instance of inevitabilities, of givens-of 'the way to. In the literature which labyrinths have prompted things are' made palpable. This can engross the least­ into being, the stress has been similarly variousi now Chesterton's scientific of people: much of art, much of social trans­ the reader 'loses' himself or herself pleasurably in the dictum that action, is given to the iterative and the reiterative: winding ways, and now the motif of entrapment or oft en, we are solaced by seeing, and by saying, that circumscription seems all-powerful. Not surprising­ 'One may things are so. Irish has no word for either 'yes' or 'no', ly, a Chaucer or a Dante will have money on success but even the most hibernian of personalities can warm in exploration, whereas an Umberto Eco or a Jorge understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star', or of Flaubert's claim that 'Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are to the factual, uttered for its own sweet or sour sake. Luis Borges is much less sanguine. Borges, in 'Laby­ longing to move the And 'Star-Scam '? Wise after the event if not rinth', writes 'Forget the onslaught/ of the bull that before, we may shrug at the bilked investors, who is a man and whose/ strange and plural form haunts stars to pity'~ quickly look as odd as those caught up, in an earlier the tangle/ of unending interwoven stone./ He does century, in tulipomania. And yet there is something not exist. In the black dust/ hope not even for the Having the stars generous, something resolute even, in wanting to put savage beast.' N o bones, so to speak, about that. the stamp of selfhood out there in the labyrinth of On the other hand, there are plenty of people who around the place the heavens.