Moorhouse’s ‘The Writer in the Time of Terror’ scrutinises the federal government’s response to the rise of Islamist terrorism from June 2004 to July 2006, and concludes that its only clear ‘success’ has been a series of hazardous encroachments on our freedom of expression. The essay’s value resides in its careful cataloguing of these recent incursions, some of which never made copy in the nation’s newspapers. The essay’s appeal springs largely from the unique viewpoint Moorhouse brings to the debate – that of a diehard leftie prepared to rubber-stamp the Howard line that the terrorist threat is ‘real’ and ‘serious’. We read on to observe a worried man knead the cant of youth in his hands. But the essay’s crowning achievement is its critique of censorship per se – the spirit of which can be sensed in the following: ‘I honestly found that the two banned books enlarged my understanding of the minds of Islamist fighters and the way its leadership thinks. I was not converted.’

For Moorhouse, censorship crucially misunderstands the reading process, which is still a magical and unpredictable meeting of message, context and receiver. This section of the essay – entitled ‘Censorship is wrong-headed’ – should be used to kick off every first-year Communications class in Australia this autumn semester.

‘Wrong-headed’ is a barb easily slung at Martin Amis’ ‘The Age of Horrorism,’ which appeared in The Observer on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and which is published here for the first time in Australia. I’m a chump when it comes to Amis – until the wit elixir wears off (usually upon the first mention of women), and I awake to the smell of humbug. Amis’s tendency to be seduced by a pretty phrase rather than committed to a marriage with the truth is a significant failing in this essay, especially given that it asks us ‘to cease to respect the quality of [Islamist] rage’ and ‘start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology and a cult of death’. It is an explosive invocation that has been dubbed ‘fanatical’ and ‘Islamofascist’, and should rest on premises less flimsy than this: ‘Far from wanting or trying to exterminate it, the West had no views whatever about Islam per se before September 11, 2001.’ One can only assume Amis isn’t counting the Crusades or the West’s responses to the Iranian hostage crisis and Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Amis obviously doesn’t go to the movies, either: Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1998) would have cured him of this particular delusion long ago. To be sure, films – especially Hollywood entertainments – are fictions, but they are produced to make money and aim to change no minds. I’ll take one last swipe, while I’m at it. Amis tells us that he has taken offence at Islam because of its treatment of women: ‘[A]ll men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters.’ If he really is, as he said in a recent interview, a feminist and a ‘gynocrat’, then perhaps he should cease using the masculine universal?

Whereas the Griffith Review is happy to have Moorhouse strike a thinking pose alongside a sabrerattling Amis, Overland wants it essayists to march to the beat of a single drummer: left, left, left. However, this isn’t to say that the journal’s offerings should be dismissed as agitprop. On the contrary, this issue’s exposé of the increasingly authoritarian inroads made by the Howard government on our legislative freedoms is apposite and necessary.

Brian Walters’s ‘Power and the Rule of Law’ spearheads the issue. It is a straight-shooting defence of the ‘separation of powers’ model of the state and the role of our laws to punish, but not pre-empt, criminal activity. The successful passage of anti-terror legislation through federal parliament prompts Walters to identify two alarming trends: first, a willingness on the part of the government to use the law to defend its own political interests rather than ‘curb the abuse of power’; and secondly, an unwillingness, on the part of the Opposition, to take a principled stand on issues concerning our constitutional rights. These arguments are given unsettling specificity in subsequent essays on free speech and the new electoral laws – by George Williams and Michael Head, respectively. A particular triumph of Walter’s essay is the way it combines polemic with confession: there is no doubting his unshakeable faith in the rule of law, but he is alert to the blind spots of the court process in an increasingly multicultural environment, and isn’t afraid to say so.

Also characterised by a watchdog element is David Ritter’s ‘Armed by a Story’. Ritter asks us to be suspicious of the historical analogues evoked by Australian politicians to rally support for the ‘war against terror’. To his mind, comparisons with, for example, the appeasement of Hitler are misleading, even cavalier. The misuse of history is something that Ritter feels is endemic to the Howard years, generally. The remainder of the essay throws the spotlight on the government’s ulterior motives for hosting the ‘Australian History Summit’ in August last year. Far from displaying a lack of faith in the past’s ability to teach us, Ritter urges E.H. Carr’s precept upon all those who use history in argument – ‘accuracy is an obligation, not a virtue’.

Robyn Walton’s essay, ‘Custody with Fries’, is, likewise, a kind of history lesson. She challenges the founding myth of the ‘war against terror’ – that 9/11 was an event without precedence, or a ‘shift in the paradigm’, as Amis puts it – by reminding us that terrorism is by no means new, not even to Australia. Over seven pages, Walton reels off a list of ideologically motivated attacks by revolutionary organisations de-signed to pique the memory: from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 to the Hilton Hotel bombing in 1978, and beyond. The import of this catalogue is clear: forget the past and prepare to be duped.

Just as court defenders fight sentences upon the basis of mitigating circumstances, the typical Overland essay hopes that the bringing of context to hot potato political issues will complicate the blame game. A worthy endeavour, but one can nod in agreement only so often before one nods off. The left-leaning reader has more to learn by reading Defence of the Muslim Lands or Join the Caravan than Overland. Plus, the real thrill of reading is to go against the grain, to try on other selves for size, but to remain unconverted.

With its particular focus on poetry and fiction, Island usually drifts free of the issues of the day and offers plenty of scope for the contrarian reader. Breaking with convention this quarter, the journal eschews a signpost theme ‘to let Serendipity send … what she will’. The result is an Island more anchored to the political present than usual, as evinced by Suzanne Rumney’s photograph of a camouflaged and armed Australian soldier, who stands guard on the cover.

Two of the three essays this issue are postcards from a front-line of sorts. Rumney’s essay ‘Machete Latte’ takes us on a tour through today’s East Timor, from Bomb Beach to Balibo, with side-trips to the ‘Floating Palace’ and the Dili University campus. The hard-boiled character of the writing – its staccato sentences, its tendency to understatement, its use of the present tense – is gripping and apropos the message of the piece: East Timor is a country stricken by crime, violence and injustice. There are intransigent problems in Alice Springs, too. Eleanor Hogan’s ‘The “Real” Alice’ takes us to an Aboriginal aid agency’s fancy-dress party as a way of giving a feel for the tensions that exist between blacks and whites, as well as locals and out-oftowners. But it must be said that the ‘Essay’ section is short and sweet. After that, the issue sheds its foreign correspondent feel and ushers readers to the banana lounge again with the usual fare of reviews, poems and short stories. Like Tasmania, Island remains ‘entire of itself’, as happy to break, as to fly, with the winds of change.