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Summer reading: the image and the reality to be

By Stephen Keim - posted Monday, 20 January 2014


2013 was a good year for reading. My penchant is for non-fiction but the blokes of the Blokes’ Book Club kept me in the novels game. Who could do better than Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper; JK Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy; and Tim Winton’s Eyrie.

And, for non-fiction, I finally read AJ Brown’s biography of Michael Kirby: Michael Kirby Paradox and Principles and was blown away by Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Summer holidays constitute a time when an illusory impression of endless days at the beach coincides with the topping up of my equally infinite pile of books to be read. To what extent will the reality match the illusion of tackling that pile?

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Even as I have kept working on the non-holidays over the break, the signs are, at this stage, optimistic. 

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My younger brother, Laurie, and I always exchange books at Christmas. Since they compete with other books I receive, Laurie’s gifts to me do not always get read.

Perhaps, for this reason, Laurie’s gift to me of Christmas 2013 was John Gray’s The Silence of the Animals. The Silence is a little book weighing in at just 210 pages. Gray, on the other hand, is a heavyweight, having held down Chairs in History and related topics at Oxford, Harvard, Yale and the London School of Economics. 

In reward for Laurie’s thoughtfulness, I commenced reading The Silence on Boxing Day and finished it, two days later.

The Silence excels as a book list. Gray opens with an extract from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon describing a group of tree living apes looking with puzzlement upon their Neanderthal neighbours eating raw meat and killing other animals as well as each other. He switches to the post hanging scene in Joseph Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress. (The Silence is not meant to be a joyful book.) Gray concludes with a passage from the Louis MacNiece poem, Mutations.

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Gray draws his examples, good and bad, and makes his points from other people’s writing. As a result, along the way, he manages to provide a guide to western literature including a new understanding of the writing of both Freud (tick of approval) and Jung (a cross). Of all the authors mentioned by the Gray (both known to me and completely unheard of), I am most keen to dip into the travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, bon vivant, war hero and absolute Renaissance man.

In The Silence, Gray is keen to look critically upon all myths. He saves his greatest disdain for the myth of progress: the view that, through increasing knowledge or self-knowledge, humanity is improving ethically, socially, materially.

The myth is found in religious and humanist traditions. The myths of science are different to the myths of religion but science, nonetheless, has its myths. History, indubitably, evidences both individuals and communities making the same mistakes and committing the same crimes upon one another, over and over. The downside results of the Arab Spring are tendered as but the latest example. 

The eponymous silence of the animals is contrasted with the internal dialogue of humans. No matter how much we seek silence, our troubled internal conversations continue.

The Silence becomes a search for an answer when there is no answer. The paradoxical answer is that no solution is required: “There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is required.”

As the passage from MacNiece’s Mutations suggests: Our world view may shatter when we least expect but “new Patterns from new disorders open like a rose”.

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 Marko, of Marko and Maree, our next door neighbours, shared a house during his undergraduate days with Wayne Swan. Marko became an architect and Wayne’s days in the treasury portfolio were delayed some decades. Be that as it may, Marko’s gift to me, this Christmas, was a book about economics: Dog Days: Australia after the Boom by Ross Garnaut.

The title of Dog Days is a reference to bad economic times when a government finds friends hard to keep no matter what policies are pursued. The thesis is that the first eleven years of this century have been salad days, when governments could do nothing wrong. The tide has turned for the first since the terms of trade sagged in 2011 and will get worse.

Dog Days offers much for the reader who, occasionally, sees oneself as an economist in disguise. The economic history of Australia concentrating on the Reform Years (from the start of Hawke and Keating to immediately post the passage of the GST legislation) and the Days of Complacency which set in thereafter is a great reminder course for that little bit of knowledge one imbibes from living through history.

The pleasure of Dog Days is, however, concentrated in reading a serious discussion of serious social and economic policy. Professor’s Garnaut’s prescription is three fold. Australia needs a massive depreciation of its currency to help trade exposed industries. It then needs policies which get Australia back on the path of improved productivity. And it needs good policies to ensure that the immediate reduction in average wealth caused by the depreciation is shared equitably within the community. This will, hopefully, avoid the benefits of the depreciation being blown on domestic expenditure.

The lesson for the future is that, when our terms of trade are excellent, we should save all that extra income for when times are, like they are becoming, tough.

Education, the crossover between low wage earners and the social security and tax systems and health policy are the subjects of fascinating discussion.

My favourite by far, however, is Professor Garnaut’s discussion of climate change policy. It turns out, while our main stream media were focussing on a measly few boat arrivals in Christmas Island and torture in Nauru and Manus, that both Australia and the rest of the world (especially, the US and China) have been getting on well with the job of reducing carbon emissions.

And the Prime Minister, for reasons only known to him, and Maurice Newman want to throw it all away.    

I finished Dog Days on New Year’s Eve and still got to bed before midnight.

And so I head to Angourie, on the northern New South Wales coast for three weeks, full of reading optimism, having finished my last piece of real work for last year while everyone else in the world is watching the opening overs of the Sydney (whitewash) test.

What shall I read?

My reading habits have a little of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle about them. I may end up with a Cat that is neither dead nor alive but somewhere in between.

Eminently qualified candidates for my reading attention are queuing up.

Among the books are two mid-year gifts from my nephew, Raphael (who lived with us): Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestineand Tony Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century. Denise has been urging me to read James (son of John) Button’s excellent Speechless: A Year in my Father’s Business.

And, among the presents under the Christmas tree, were Chase Madar's The Passion of Bradley Manning and Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise.

Neither has the photocopier been silent. The UNHCR’s reports on Nauru and Manus Island and Amnesty’s This is Breaking People, also, about Manus will find a place in the car, somewhere.

And, if all that fails (or runs out), I have an autobiographical manuscript by a friend of mine who, with others, turned around the state of youth justice in Queensland in the seventies.

Salad days, here I come.

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About the Author

Stephen Keim has been a legal practitioner for 30 years, the last 23 of which have been as a barrister. He became a Senior Counsel for the State of Queensland in 2004. Stephen is book reviews editor for the Queensland Bar Association emagazine Hearsay. Stephen is President of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights and is also Chair of QPIX, a non-profit film production company that develops the skills of emerging film makers for their place in industry.

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