Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Skip to main content
Absolutely Revolting

March 2002, no. 239

Welcome to the March 2002 issue of Australian Book Review!

John Monfries reviews Suharto: A Political Biography by R.E. Elson
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Biography
Custom Article Title: Summing up Suharto
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Summing up Suharto
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Repressive despot, or enlightened reformer? What are we to make of Suharto, four years after his fall? Was his prolonged rule an inevitable outcome of the Indonesian political process and of the mistakes and chaos of the Sukarno years? Or was it an illegitimate and corrupt militaristic venture, which has now been replaced by a genuine democratic political system, whatever its flaws and bloody dissensions? Is it too early to draw firm conclusions?
Book 1 Title: Suharto
Book 1 Subtitle: A Political Biography
Book Author: R.E. Elson
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $59.95 hb, 432 pp, 0 521 77326 1
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
Display Review Rating: No

Repressive despot, or enlightened reformer? What are we to make of Suharto, four years after his fall? Was his prolonged rule an inevitable outcome of the Indonesian political process and of the mistakes and chaos of the Sukarno years? Or was it an illegitimate and corrupt militaristic venture, which has now been replaced by a genuine democratic political system, whatever its flaws and bloody dissensions? Is it too early to draw firm conclusions?

At its close, Sukarno’s Guided Democracy looked like an aberration, just as the New Order looks like an aberration now. But an aberration from what? Suharto’s reign poses the question of the normal legitimate structure of the Indonesian state. Looking back on their modern history, Indonesians see their politics as a series of tragically failed experiments. Even basic rules of the game now seem unclear. Pancasila, the five principles devised by Sukarno as the ideological cornerstone of the Indonesian state, was, despite its vagueness, an excellent start in conceptualising the basis for a just and plural society. But it was only a start, and the tight control by the Suharto government over all aspects of life, including ideology, vitiated serious attempts to give it more substance through any free and intelligent debate. Now Pancasila is hardly discussed.

Read more: John Monfries reviews 'Suharto: A Political Biography' by R.E. Elson

Write comment (0 Comments)
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Letters
Subheading: Letters - March 2002
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the 15th of the current month. Emailed letters must include a telephone number for verification.

Peter Craven responds to Hilary McPhee

Dear Editor,

As someone whose business it is to dish out criticism of books when required, I am not in the habit of replying to criticism. Recently, a journalist has suggested that I be put out to pasture as the editor of The Best Australian Essays annual I brought into being, and an academic has disputed my right to introduce the Quarterly Essays I commission. These are not, to my mind, happy or wise suggestions, but one can’t complain – they come with the territory. I edit the major collections of fiction and non-fiction that appear in this country. I also edit a series of more or less political pamphlets that have received their fair share of attention. On top of that, I have published a great deal of literary criticism in the press over the last however many years, some of it, by necessity, scathing. I am bound to have displeased and wearied all sorts of splendid people over that time.
Display Review Rating: No

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the 15th of the current month. Emailed letters must include a telephone number for verification. 

Peter Craven responds to Hilary McPhee

Dear Editor,

As someone whose business it is to dish out criticism of books when required, I am not in the habit of replying to criticism. Recently, a journalist has suggested that I be put out to pasture as the editor of The Best Australian Essays annual I brought into being, and an academic has disputed my right to introduce the Quarterly Essays I commission. These are not, to my mind, happy or wise suggestions, but one can’t complain – they come with the territory. I edit the major collections of fiction and non-fiction that appear in this country. I also edit a series of more or less political pamphlets that have received their fair share of attention. On top of that, I have published a great deal of literary criticism in the press over the last however many years, some of it, by necessity, scathing. I am bound to have displeased and wearied all sorts of splendid people over that time. 

Read more: Letters - March 2002

Write comment (0 Comments)
Geoff Page reviews ‘The Sixth Swan’ by Diane Fahey and ‘Fiery Waters’ by Robyn Rowland
Free Article: No
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Rather Different Poets
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Since 1982, Robyn Rowland has published three poetry collections at roughly ten-year intervals. She has also been an eminent, sometimes controversial, academic. Her poetry must have been a release from the stylistic and emotional restrictions of her academic work.

Fiery Waters, her new collection, is a leisurely and deeply felt progress across most aspects of a middle-aged woman’s life. Both sensual and sensuous, it is concerned with the ‘real world’, whether in apparently autobiographical poems of love and loss or in her more political poems against injustices here and overseas.
Book 1 Title: The Sixth Swan
Book Author: Diane Fahey
Book 1 Biblio: Five Islands Press, $16.45 pb, 116pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
Book 2 Title: Fiery Waters
Book 2 Author: Robyn Rowland
Book 2 Biblio: Five Islands Press, $16.45 pb, 89pp
Book 2 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 2 Cover (800 x 1200):
Display Review Rating: No

Since 1982, Robyn Rowland has published three poetry collections at roughly ten-year intervals. She has also been an eminent, sometimes controversial, academic. Her poetry must have been a release from the stylistic and emotional restrictions of her academic work.

Fiery Waters, her new collection, is a leisurely and deeply felt progress across most aspects of a middle-aged woman’s life. Both sensual and sensuous, it is concerned with the ‘real world’, whether in apparently autobiographical poems of love and loss or in her more political poems against injustices here and overseas.

The book commences with a section on sexual love involving a somewhat problematic relationship between a young man who eventually wants to move on, and the narrator, an older woman who wants to settle down. The poems are generally erotic (‘just delicate fingers on the thigh loosens, just lips whispering hot over the nipple shivers’) but they also have a sense of distance that comes with experience: ‘In middle age it begins not to matter – / the shape of the body, the softer more malleable flesh. / We know other things.’ Rowland then proceeds to poems about her children (including a powerful one, ‘Unbirthday’, about a woman mourning an inescapable abortion) and about the end of the relationship already mentioned.

Read more: Geoff Page reviews ‘The Sixth Swan’ by Diane Fahey and ‘Fiery Waters’ by Robyn Rowland

Write comment (0 Comments)