Secondly, he claims that much of his account is self-deprecatory and ironic, and, unlike many politicians, he confesses his faults. I acknowledged this in the review, but perhaps gave it insufficient attention. But the key point is that the flaws he admits to – ‘lacking the killer instinct’, ‘idiosyncratic factional player’, being no numbers man – are parts of his endearing public persona, and he is happy to play them up while neglecting the flaws I catalogued, which undermined his effectiveness as a minister.

Of these, the one that appears to disturb him most is his alleged inability to prioritise. His defence becomes an extraordinary ad hominem argument that, while it was very hard for him to prioritise major scientific issues, ‘Treasury and Finance were never going to challenge Dr Blewett [as Health minister] to prioritise’, apparently because ‘even the toughest Treasury bureaucrat had a mother or a child’. The notion of benign Treasury and Finance officials not insisting on health priorities will have health ministers cackling all round the country.

Neal Blewett, Leura, NSW

Sceptical by nature

Dear Editor,

I read Neal Blewett’s perceptive review of Barry Jones’s autobiography, A Thinking Reed, and Barry’s letter in reply, which contains the memorable sentence, ‘Dr Blewett’s personal criticisms of me are very broad while my criticisms are very precise, or forensic’. Not of me, they’re not. Hence this letter. Most of the political events described in Barry’s book took place twenty years or so ago. Even if they are not particularly important, the book purports to be in part history, and as such it should be accurate.

In the chapter ‘Sleepers, Wake!’, Barry asserts that early in the 1980s I had already decided that I wanted the Industry portfolio when Labor took office. Bill Hayden and I then combined ‘oddly’ with Chris Hurford (the spokesman for Manufacturing Industry) to scuttle a report of the New Technology Task Force, of which Barry was secretary. After that, I persuaded Hayden to push Hurford out of Manufacturing Industry. Then I took the job myself.

From the early 1980s until the election of the Hawke government, I was shadow minister for Communications and Regional and Provincial Development, and believed that in government I would be the minister in these portfolios. Industry was not for me a particular area of interest. I did not combine with Hayden and Hurford to scuttle the technology report. Nor did I persuade Hayden to push Hurford out of Manufacturing: I never tried to do so. At no time was I Opposition spokesman on Manufacturing Industry. Bob Hawke’s memoirs (1994) accurately describe how I became minister for Industry when the Labor government was elected in 1983. There is nothing ‘precise’ or ‘forensic’ about Barry’s account of these events. It is disappointing that his story was not checked by a couple of phone calls or a quick reference to Hansard.

There are other aspects of A Thinking Reed which are less ‘precise’ than they might be. I mention a couple.

I am not included in Barry’s list of illustrious ‘members’ of the Victorian Anti-Hanging Committee, although at his invitation I was during 1966 and 1967 on the committee of that organisation, where we dealt with mundane things like fund-raising, correspondence and accounts.

I was ‘sceptical’, he writes, about the 1983 Technology Summit. This implies that I opposed it. In fact, I believed in it and supported it in cabinet. Apart from Bob Hawke, who opened the conference, I was the only cabinet member to attend. Certainly, Barry and I had disagreements about policy priorities. ‘Sceptical’ is a word he uses about me more than once. He’s right: I am sceptical by nature. So when in 1981 he tried to get my support for the report on technology and his book Sleepers, Wake!, he writes that I said, ‘“Mmm, Mmm” to both, but made no effort to assist’. That must have sounded highly sceptical. But then, I hadn’t read either the report or his book. Later, when I had read Sleepers, Wake!, I spoke and wrote about its importance.

Not surprisingly, A Thinking Reed is at times a fascinating account of an interesting and productive life. I am sorry that Neal Blewett used the phrase ‘innocent abroad’ in his review. It seems to have caught on, and has become an image of convenience. ‘Bazza’, as his close friends and admirers call him, is really no more innocent than the rest of us. Without that façade, he’s at his most charming.

John Button, Richmond, Vic.

Some thoughts on winning the Calibre Prize

Dear Editor,

Where to start? 1949 sounds nice and illogical. I contracted rheumatic fever that year and have been suspected ever since of having a weak heart, but the evidence, other than a murmur, has never been obvious. A few years ago, the technology improved. A cardiologist was able to show me that my left ventricle was scarred and the mitral valve leaking, and that I had an ectopic heartbeat. Other than that, my heart was all right. The cardiologist saw that the ectopic heartbeat, an extra beat that leaves the heart without blood for a couple of seconds, was the major problem. ‘We can fix that,’ he assured me. Blood pressure medication made the ectopic heart go away. I tend to faint easily because my blood pressure is often low, but never mind.

So, intimations of mortality and all that. I decided to write something about my family, in case I shuffled off. I wrote for myself, sure that the story was too Dutch, too personal, to be of interest to Australians.

During 2005 and 2006 I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands, some on my own, some with my husband. On our last visit, the day before we returned to Australia found us in Leeuwarden, the royal city of the North. We were looking for the Prinsenhof, but stumbled across a school around the back. A dead school, a Jewish school, preserved as a permanent memorial. In what was once the playground, there are concrete pylons covered with the last words the children wrote in their notebooks. On one of these poles there is a letter from the chief rabbi of Leeuwarden. He and his family were to be executed at dawn on 2 November 1944. The rabbi wrote: It is de middel van de nacht en daar zein sterren. Waar bent U Got? Got waar bent U? (It is the middle of the night and there are stars. Where are you God? God, where are you?)

At dusk on 1 November 1944, British bombers and members of the Dutch Resistance blew up the dykes surrounding Walcheren, the island where I come from. By the middle of that starlit night, the first twenty British landing craft fighting to get through the breaches had been lost with all hands. Members of the Resistance watched helplessly, fearful that that the operation might fail. But the Allies pushed on. At dawn of November 2, the rabbi of Leeuwarden, his wife and children were executed, even as the liberation of the Netherlands began.

The Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay, an initiative of Australian Book Review and the Copyright Agency Limited, gave me a reason and the discipline to tell part of a story that I found engrossing. The word limit of Calibre is ten thousand. Not nearly enough, I thought, but sufficient to explore some themes. All I saw was the ten thousand-word limit. I took no notice of the monetary value of the prize, because I had no expectations. I hoped to get on a shortlist, but this seemed unlikely.

When Peter Rose, the Editor of ABR and a judge of the Calibre, rang to tell me that I had won, for the first time in months that bloody ectopic heartbeat kicked in with such a wallop I thought I was about to die. Not now, not now! I heard Peter ask: ‘Are you all right?’ Then he mentioned something about $10,000 and I thought, ‘Silly man, the prize is $1,000’. Then something about editing and house style, and did I perhaps have any photographs.

House style? I’d had had such slim hopes for my essay that I hadn’t even bothered with ‘house style’. Looking back at past ABRs, I saw my essay was nothing like house style! In December I visited ABR headquarters and was presented with my edited essay. Every line carried pencil marks to conform with house style, and had been ‘tightened up here and there’. Mortified, I managed to croak a thank-you. To Peter, Jo Case, and T.J. Christie, thank you again for all that work.

Included in ABR’s selection of photographs was a little black-and-white shot of my mother in an empty Zeeland landscape. This is the photograph that Chong Wengho used to create the cover. How alone she looks. Mother adored being photographed in beautiful clothes, hair done. She never told me the context of that photograph, apart from a throw-away line: Ach, I was running. Chong has created a work of art that everyone who has been involved in war can relate to; that inevitable moment when it’s just you and maybe your God. Thank you, Chong.

And thanks to the Copyright Agency Limited for making this prize available. The $10,000 will help fund another trip to the Netherlands to continue my work. To the judges – Peter Rose, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Imre Saluzinsky – thank you, thank you.

I wanted to include the story of the rabbi of Leeuwarden in the essay, but word space didn’t allow. It was there however, in Leeuwarden, that I saw the structure of the essay. I hope that as the rabbi and his family died in November 1944 they knew the liberation was underway in the far south-west of the country. I hope that at the end they knew that that was where their God had to be that night.

Elisabeth Holdsworth, Bundanoon, NSW

It was a privilege to be able to publish ‘An die Nachgeborenen’. Many readers have been moved by Elisabeth Holdsworth’s story. No other essay I have published has generated such a positive response. Later this year, Radio National will broadcast ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ (with the author as narrator) in its ‘First Person’ program. Ed.

Poetic and pragmatic

Dear Editor,

I was moved to tears by Elisabeth Holdsworth’s prize-winning essay, ‘An die Nachgeborenen’, and moved to write to say thank you to ABR for publishing it (and to CAL for instituting the Calibre Prize). It is an amazing story, but what makes it an outstanding essay is its elegant structure, moving as it does effortlessly between present and past, taking the reader into the world of the author’s childhood, yet always with a sense of the political present. The many shocking events are never sensationalised, unfolding gradually in a distinctive style that is both poetic and pragmatic. And what evocative photographs!

How good it is to see a writer being rewarded for a memoir that is not about celebrities, but that relates a personal story uniquely Dutch and which also has something to teach us about our world and about humanity, in a way that can touch us all.

Sylvia Martin, Woodbridge, Tas.

The great globalisation debate

Dear Editor

I am grateful to Sean Scalmer for his very positive review of my recent book with Charles Lemert, The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization (February 2007). He has taken considerable care not only to identify the complexities of what political theorist David Held calls ‘the great globalisation debate’, but expertly situates our contribution to that debate. I write only to correct his point that we ‘admit’ to not having sought out the ‘voices of the poor’. It is true that we admit that the impression is made that the new individualism is a fad of the higher social class, but our book concludes with a discussion of aggression as a mode of resistance to the changed world conditions, for which we offer the detailed case study of Norman Bishop, a man who has faced countless trials in life, including poverty. Scalmer nowhere mentions our plotting of Bishop’s life, nor our more detailed analyses of the new socio-economic inequalities spawned by globalisation.

Relatedly, Scalmer points out that our book skates on thin empirical ice and that our argument for structural changes in the world order is, he supposes, a bit ‘unconvincing’. Whilst I do not wish to argue the point here of what constitutes thick empirical evidence, I would suggest that the proposition put by Charles Lemert and myself concerning the ‘deadly costs of global violence’ is indeed something that ‘everyone knows’. I admit, though, that it may be less well known in some places than others. Certainly, in Africa, the Middle East, central Asia, east Asia, the United States, the Carribean and even Europe, global violence is both a fact that everyone must live with and a symptom of deep structural collapse of long-standing liberal values. Still, I much appreciate the time taken and the praise offered by Scalmer.

Anthony Elliott, Flinders University, SA

Sean Scalmer replies:

Anthony Elliott’s letter raises three issues about my review that merit a brief response. First, the authors’ admission that I referred to was: ‘Our stories are frequently, though not entirely, the stories of men and women of relative privilege’ (p.11). While it is true (and laudable) that Elliott and Lemert scrutinise the life of a single poor man in the United States, no individuals from the periphery of the global order are so examined. The emotional experiences of the transient in Mexico City, or of the refugee fleeing the Sudan, for example, are not accorded equivalent attention to the stockbroker in Berlin or the academic in London. To put it simply, the lives examined are uniformly ‘northern’ and post-industrial, and, with one exception, affluent. In a book dedicated to the emotional costs of globalisation around the world, this is a major shortcoming. The (global) scope of the argument is undermined by the (metropolitan) narrowness of the research material.

Second, I labelled Elliott and Lemert’s empirical research ‘thin’, not only because it was based upon a very small number of life histories (conventionally two per chapter), but because parts of these life histories were deliberately fabricated or invented. This odd procedure was not explained or defended adequately in The New Individualism, and Elliott’s letter sheds no further light on its scope or intellectual merits.

Finally, my review suggested that the book did not fully explain what was ‘new’ about the ‘new’ individualism and the allegedly ‘new’ order that is thought to nurture it. Elliott’s letter, in emphasising the existence of violence around the globe (certainly not something new), and in overlooking the wider question of the novelty (or otherwise) of ‘the new individualism’, does not directly address this criticism, either. Despite our mutual misunderstandings, I saw much of value in Elliott and Lemert’s book, and I commend it to interested readers.

Acrostic prank

Dear Editor,

It was a pleasure to read Bob Reece’s excellent article on the Fremantle Herald poetry hoax in ABR (October 2006). The reference in parenthesis to the acrostic poem prank that was pulled on the Bulletin in 1960 by Gwen Harwood is not quite accurate, however. The responsible literary editor was Desmond O’Grady and not, as Reece states, Vincent Buckley. O’Grady wrote of his involvement in the affair in the Independent Monthly in 1996. Though interrogated by members of the New South Wales police when the poem appeared (as was his editor, Donald Horne), O’Grady was spared prosecution for obscenity, which of course had been one of the nastier and more absurd consequences of the ‘Ern Malley’ affair.

Simon Caterson, Melbourne, Vic.