Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media
Edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau
Columbia University Press | $41.95
Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone
Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess and Ingrid Richardson
Routledge | $225
The Great Indian Phone Book: How Cheap Mobile Phones Change Business, Politics and Daily Life
Robin Jeffrey & Assa Doron
Hurst and Company | $45

THE first public mobile phone call was made just over forty years ago, on 3 April 1973. The caller was a Motorola engineer in New York City. The phone was a cream-coloured brick, a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which weighed a kilogram and took ten hours to charge.

Over the past few weeks the international media has been throwing a birthday party for what is now a middle-aged technology (if you missed the festivities, try tiny.cc/40phone). The nostalgic photos of flip-phones and classic Nokias remind us how far the technology has come.

As it enters its fifth decade, the mobile is the centrepiece of a US$800 billion industry. Ubiquitous in virtually every nation, it has displaced the personal computer as the focus of investment and innovation in consumer technologies.

In recent years a growing body of research has been documenting the cultural history of mobile technology, exploring the diverse ways in which it shapes public and private life. Three recent books on the topic capture a representative sample of the fascinating debates under way.

WHILE early studies of mobiles focused on communications practices, researchers are increasingly interested in the mobile’s new status as a digital content platform. Moving Data explores this theme through a collection of short, scholarly essays. It approaches Apple’s iPhone from the perspective of media theory, seeing it as a paradigmatic object that crystallises a larger shift in the way culture is produced and distributed.

As the book’s editors argue, the iPhone brings with it a “convergence of technologies, cultures, and marketing practices that were previously thought incommensurable.” The contributors to Moving Data investigate, from different angles, this common theme — the coming together of tech companies, with experience producing hardware or online search, and the classic content industries of cinema and broadcasting, under the sign of the mobile.

This is a striking feature of today’s media landscape, but we are still grappling with its implications. Moving Data is very useful in this respect, offering absorbing case studies and critical analyses that help to put the changes in context. I particularly enjoyed Pelle Snickars’s chapter, which explores the debate about Apple’s App Store, the “walled garden” that provokes passionate criticism yet has fostered innovation; Göran Bolin’s philosophical ruminations on the history of mobile media technologies; and the chapters on regulation and corporate strategy by Jennifer Holt, Alisa Perren and Karen Petruska.

The book has a European skew, reflecting the backgrounds of many of its contributors, which makes for a welcome addition to the literature on the iPhone, a publishing genre dominated by American tech journalists.

Like Moving Data, Studying Mobile Media is concerned with convergence as a logic of today’s mobile industries. Despite what the title suggests, this is not a textbook but a collection of essays on different aspects of mobile industries and culture. The publisher’s hardback pricing might make this book one for libraries only (though many of the chapters can be found in draft online).

Together, the essays cover a representative spread of current debates, and are complemented by three case studies that focus on South Korea, China and Finland — nations with contrasting traditions of mobile take-up and use.

The book opens with a series of conceptual chapters, including a marvellous analysis by Brisbane-based media scholar Jean Burgess that frames “the iPhone moment” in relation to debates about innovation, creativity and gender. It then moves into some new and exciting areas, such as mobile gaming, mapping and photography. The mobile’s impact on each of these areas is hard to overstate.

Take photography: as the chapter by Daniel Palmer notes, the phone manufacturer Nokia has likely put “more cameras into people’s hands than in the whole previous history of photography.” Yet this boom in image-making has coincided with new social anxieties. Palmer’s essay explores the increasingly complex moral terrain of mobile photography in public places, like beaches and malls, where concerns about “upskirting” and other mobile-enabled nastiness make it difficult for professional photographers to shoot in the way they used to. But he also notes that today’s situation recalls an earlier age of photographic democratisation, at the end of the nineteenth century, when newly portable cameras created similar panics about “hand-camera fiends.”

Labour is another area of concern of this book. The question of who makes our devices, who does the coding for the apps, and who creates the value-added content necessary for social platforms is emerging as a renewed focus of debate. This theme appears throughout the essays, especially in chapters by Jack Linchuan Qiu — who examines the scandal around Foxconn, an Apple supplier whose Guangdong factory has been the site of strikes and suicides — and John Banks, who considers the shifting modes of production that underlie the development of mobile games.

THIS brings us to our third book, The Great Indian Phone Book, which has a more specific story to tell. India — a nation of 1.2 billion people and fifteen official languages, where the growth of telecom industries has been explosive — makes for a unique vantage point. In 1998, there were fewer than a million mobiles in India. Fourteen years later, the number of mobiles had leapt to almost 900 million. This is all the more remarkable given that most people had little engagement with fixed-line telephony, a technology reserved for elites and public servants.

In The Great Indian Phone Book, Robin Jeffrey (a political scientist) and Assa Doron (an anthropologist) have produced a riveting study that traces the effects of mobile technology on the lives of everyday people, from the fishermen who can now more effectively set the price of their catch to the electronic technicians who make a living from repairing banged-up handsets.

India’s mobile revolution has been premised not on high-end smartphones, which are the focus of the other two books, but on cheap, durable handsets. Many phones have multiple-SIM capabilities, allowing budget-conscious users to switch between carriers to take advantage of special rates. Nokia, not Apple or Samsung, is the market leader. There is a lively trade in secondhand handsets, and informal repair businesses can be found in the smallest villages.

II enjoyed how The Great Indian Phone Book approaches mobile culture from many different angles, including telecommunications policy (the skulduggery of spectrum auctions), cultural-economic history (the ad campaigns that market the mobile lifestyle), and infrastructure (the art of mobile tower construction). This is a 360- degree vision of mobile culture, grounded in everyday life but with a historical consciousness and a deep understanding of India’s cultural politics.

The book’s most absorbing parts are the ethnographic portraits that introduce us to a cross-section of Indian society, all touched in some way by the mobile. Readers will encounter peasants, parents, professionals, entrepreneurs, lovers, criminals and everyone in between.

With The Great Indian Phone Book, Jeffrey and Doron offer a timely reminder that mobile cultures are moving in many directions simultaneously. With convergence, the technological gap between the mobile and other devices is closing — but the uses to which the mobile is put around the world remain impossibly diverse. •

Ramon Lobato is a postdoctoral fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

• Read an edited extract from The Great Indian Phone Book

FOR the past twenty years, some of the more optimistic figures in the solar industry have predicted that their technology would change the electricity game forever. They have largely been dismissed as green romantics or hopeless optimists.

But now it seems that their predictions are coming true. The electricity industry, virtually unchanged and unchallenged for a century or more, is facing a revolution: not from the outside but from within, from its own customer base. To quote the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group that accounts for most of the utilities in the United States, the industry that once considered itself indispensable and untouchable has found that its business model is being trashed. Declining demand is forcing wholesale energy prices lower. Worse still, the industry’s entire infrastructure, with trillions of dollars of sunk capital, may no longer be needed or wanted by many consumers.

“Consumers are realising they don’t need the power industry at all,” says David Crane, the head of NRG – the largest generator of power in the United States. “That is ultimately where big parts of the country will go.” Jim Rogers, the head of Duke Energy, the largest utility in the United States, agrees. “If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using us for backup,” he told a conference recently.

In Europe, it’s much the same story. Fossil fuel generators are being pulled off-line or are not being built because solar is changing the market dynamics. In Germany, Macquarie Group thinks that the electricity system as it is currently constructed is already “kaput,” and that the impact of rooftop solar is “unstoppable” in several European countries, with major implications for incumbent utilities. UBS, Deutsche and JP Morgan agree that solar PV has become a “no brainer” for customers, even in Europe.

Curiously, in Australia, you don’t hear that sort of talk in the public domain, even though the proportion of homes here with rooftop solar PV is the highest in the world. By some estimates, between 10 and 20 per cent of available houses have a rooftop system.

But behind the public silence lies widespread concern within the industry about the impact of solar PV, and how to manage it – or even how to stop it. Electricity demand in Australia in 2012 was 10 per cent below the forecast made just twelve months earlier. In a high-volume, low-margin game, that’s having a dramatic impact on revenues. Some analysts predict that the price of wholesale electricity at the midday peak – which once provided the bulk of revenues for generators – may soon be lower than at midnight. The industry is truly being turned on its head.

That was the big issue that was canvassed when the heads of Australia’s leading energy suppliers gathered in Sydney in March for the latest informal twice-yearly gathering where they freely discuss the issues of the day. Mostly, these have been incremental challenges, but the issues canvassed in March were more fundamental, and most likely part of a vicious circle from the industry’s perspective. The networks they’ve been encouraged to supersize over the past few years are losing what had been considered a “given” in the industry – ever-increasing demand, and a dependable rise in revenues.

That has come as a result of a troika of new influences – declining manufacturing capacity, the impact of energy-efficiency schemes, and the ability of households to produce some of their own electricity requirements from rooftop solar systems. Add to this a new phenomenon – the “inelasticity” of rising electricity bills. It was generally believed that people would continue consuming and paying, even with rising bills. But now the customers have an option not to. And while the process of greatly expanding the electricity grid has contributed to a near doubling of electricity prices, the cost of solar PV has fallen by more than 80 per cent.

There is now clearly a cheaper alternative for homeowners with suitable rooftops, not to mention greater use of energy-efficient appliances and lighting. What are the networks to do? They complain that solar PV is eating out revenue during the day but not solving the capacity problems of the evening peaks.

That particular problem may be solved by another technology that is following closely on the heels of solar PV – battery storage. This is considered by some in the solar industry to be the holy grail (it used to be “socket parity,” but we’re past that now). But even if it covers much of the evening peak and avoids the need for bigger networks in the future, battery storage doesn’t necessarily help the networks deal with their major current problem, which is ensuring they get revenue from network investments already made.

The more households and businesses turn to solar, and progressively to storage, the more the networks will need to extract revenue from fixed charges and their remaining clients. This could initiate a “death spiral”: the more utilities appear to declare war on their customers and seek to make solar unattractive by increasing fixed charges and raising tariffs and regulatory barriers, the more battery storage and distributed energy seems appealing. The more utilities feel they are competing against their customers, the quicker they will become estranged.

FOR the industry, the only reasonable option seems to be to encourage people to consume more. Mandating them to turn on more air conditioning or reinstall wasteful appliances obviously won’t work. It’s time to think of something new, and that option could be electric vehicles. EVs are starting to make inroads into the market, inspired by “first users” and those with the money to indulge, but utilities are only playing around at the edges. Encouraging their use – as EV costs inevitably fall – will not just increase demand on the electricity grid, snapping the death-spiral scenario and reassuring investors, but could also present socially attractive options such as providing an accelerated and clearer path to a smarter energy system and reducing Australia’s expensive reliance on imported and dirty fossil fuels. That can then be presented as a hedge against the rising cost of diesel and petrol, and turn the closure of refineries in Australia into a virtue rather than a regret.

Greg Gutheridge, a US-based energy industry specialist from consulting firm Accenture, says electricity networks have a lot to learn from the experience of the telecommunications industry, which has gone through its own massive transition from fixed line telephone to a mobile product. It, too, found a new product that protected its revenues in the form of data. Customers now spend significantly more on telecommunications products than they ever did in the past.

“They are an interesting bellwether for utilities,” says Gutheridge. Indeed, the Edison report cites the experience of the telcos, as well as airlines (which were opened up to increased competition in the 1980s), as a warning to its own industry. “We are just not quite sure how quickly some of these distributed or disruptive technologies will enter the market,” Gutheridge says. But new technologies could affect 20 to 30 per cent of their market, and there will be new competition from the telcos that also see opportunities in the home energy market.

One of the biggest trends in the United States is for utilities to get stuck between really big communications companies such as Verizon, Vodafone, Comcast and ADT, who see a move into home energy management as a viable way to use their bundled services and products.

“If we assume [the electric vehicle market] does pick up, then we can expect new infrastructure providers coming into the market – auto manufacturers, office services companies – especially for EV,” Gutheridge says. “Retailers and network companies will have to rethink a number of things. They will be less in competition with each other and more in competition with these other providers.”

But can the network operators adapt? Can they be fleet of foot, or even of mind? David Roberts from Grist is not so sure, noting that the challenge of having to reshape their business models has, if you’ll excuse the pun, come as a shock to the system. “Remember… that these utilities are not Google or Facebook,” Roberts wrote in one of a series of articles that are recommended reading. “They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention.

“This is a venerable old boys’ network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century. A friggin’ century, more or less without innovation, and now they’re supposed to scramble and be all hip and new-age? Unlikely.” •

Giles Parkinson is Editor of Renew Economy.

Peter Browne writes:
Arriving at the office on my first day as producer of a new Radio National program, The National Interest, in early 1996, I discovered that two important decisions had already been made. The theme music for the program was to be the Kronos Quartet’s recording of Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm’n’ing,” and each day an airmail copy of the International Herald Tribune would arrive on my desk. If I hadn’t already known who had devised the program then this was all the evidence I needed.

The person behind those decisions was long-time ABC producer and broadcaster Jill Kitson, who died last Sunday night. Jill had worked in radio since 1982, when she was recruited by Malcolm Long to produce Terry Lane’s morning program on Melbourne’s 3LO. Together, Terry and Jill created a mix of current affairs and conversation that attracted enormous loyalty and admiration, first in Melbourne and later in Hobart and Sydney too. By the time I started work at Radio National, Jill had been presenting outstanding programs of her own for several years, including The Americas and, more recently, Book Talk and Lingua Franca.

After she retired to the Blue Mountains, Jill wrote a series of reviews for Inside Story. The one that perhaps best captures her incisive, engaged and sometimes acerbic approach – and is also one of our most-read articles – is this review of two books about Jane Austen first published in October 2011. Austen and Kitson are a great match, and this piece has plenty of both.

•••

Why Jane Austen?
By Rachel M. Brownstein
Columbia University Press | $43.95

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter
By William Deresiewicz
The Penguin Press | $43.95

NO LITERARY classics have a greater claim to “Englishness” than the novels of Jane Austen. Set among the gentry of the southern counties during the Regency period, Austen’s six novels depict the minutiae of daily life as she herself observed and experienced it, in the Hampshire villages of Steventon, where for more than half her life her father was the rector, and Chawton, where she lived with her widowed mother and sister Cassandra for the last nine years of her life. It was a narrower existence than that of the Brontë sisters a generation later. They left home – a Yorkshire rectory – to work as governesses or schoolteachers; Charlotte even ventured abroad, to teach in Belgium. Jane Austen’s years in Bath, where the Austen family moved after her father retired, and Southampton, where she and her mother and Cassandra lived for a time after his death, expanded her horizons but not the focus of her attention. In September 1814, in the midst of writing Emma in the parlour at Chawton, she offered this insouciant advice to her niece Anna: “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.” In another light-hearted letter written the same year, to her brother Edward, she likened herself to an inept portrait miniaturist: “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”

That Austen, with her witty self-deprecation, is – like her novels – so very “English” is a clue to her continuing popularity in England, but what about the United States, where Jane Austen is a multimillion dollar industry, giving employment to academics, actors, film-makers and writers? Rachel M. Brownstein’s platitudinous answer to this question concludes her book:

Jane Austen is the focal point of nostalgia… not only for Heritage England… but also for a world that seemed more comprehensible and coherent, and for the novel itself in its youth and vigour, the novel endowed (as it appears in retrospect) with an integrity, innocence, health and prosperity, a hopefulness and seriousness of purpose, that has been or is being lost.

Brownstein and William Deresiewicz are among the latest American writers to capitalise on the popularity of Jane Austen in the United States. Their claim on our attention, however – that their subject is Jane Austen – is a ruse to buttonhole us about themselves. Both write with the breezy informality of the blog.

So we learn that throughout her long academic career, Professor Brownstein has been teaching courses on Austen’s novels and keeping abreast of what she calls “Jane-o-mania” in all its manifestations. Part memoir, part “biographical criticism,” part catalogue, her book characterises Jane Austen as a teacher whose books impart lessons about life: “In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth had learned to put thinking above feeling, and so did I, by reading about her.” Brownstein’s free-flowing prose, studded with rhetorical questions (like her title) and digressions, brings to mind the garrulous Miss Bates of Emma. She tells us that she tells her students “about the coteries of so-called Janeites, a term coined by the English literary critic George Saintsbury, and the gallant gentlemen Virginia Woolf wrote about who felt about criticism of their darling as they would feel about an insult to one of their aunts (these were gay guys, they guess).”

William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education is a chatty memoir about the self-transformation wrought by reading Jane Austen. The banalities Deresiewicz learned from each of her six novels are summed up on the back cover:

Emma: Pay attention to the everyday things; Pride and Prejudice: You aren’t born perfect; Northanger Abbey: Stay awake: don’t take things for granted; Mansfield Park: Being entertained is not the same thing as being happy; Persuasion: Be honest with your friends; Sense and Sensibility: Love is about growing up, not staying young.

The idea of reading Jane Austen to learn lessons about life is totally repugnant to me. Equally repugnant are memoirs about lessons learned from reading her. I read Jane Austen for pleasure, for the instant delight of, say, the opening of Persuasion: “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one…”

The poised irony of this character sketch, the rhythm of the sentence with its paradoxical tone – Jane Austen’s style – makes me laugh out loud. Vladimir Nabokov, in his 1950s Cornell lecture on Mansfield Park (published in Lectures on Literature, 1980) ends by reflecting upon Jane Austen’s style, and particularly what he calls “the epigrammatic intonation, a certain terse rhythm in the witty expression of a slightly paradoxical thought. The tone of voice is terse and tender, dry and yet musical, pithy but limpid and light.”

That style is what gives endless pleasure to readers of her novels, not the “life lessons” touted by Brownstein and Deresiewicz. Austen’s style is what is lacking in film or TV adaptations of her novels, however faithful they are to the dialogue and the plot. So in the 2008 BBC version of Persuasion, Sir Walter is portrayed as a vain snob, just as Jane Austen declares him to be, but not as foolishly comic, which her irony renders him. Underpinning the style is her command of language, the acuity of her observations, her finely nuanced moral sensibility and her natural wit.

All six of her novels are about love and marriage among the county gentry. To find “lessons” in them is to lose sight of them as comedies of manners, in which bad behaviour keeps breaking out. If the comedy arises from human folly, the drama, the excitement, the plot itself springs from bad behaviour, incivility, and its consequences. In Mansfield Park, it is the bad behaviour of the two Bertram sisters; in Pride and Prejudice, the bad behaviour of the two youngest Bennet sisters – as well as that of the young men they flirt with – that animates the plot. Austen’s most engaging heroines, Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet, in addition to being witty, intelligent and spirited, are at crucial moments breathtakingly badly behaved. Emma wounds Miss Bates, behaves cattily to Miss Fairfax, and, in her arrogance, almost ruins her protégé Harriet. Elizabeth bluntly tells her suitor Mr Collins: “You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who would make you so…”; she replies insolently to Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s rude questions about her upbringing; and when Darcy, proposing to her, refers to her social “inferiority” as a “degradation,” she rounds upon him: deploring his manners, accusing him of dividing his friend Bingley from her sister Jane, of ruining Wickham’s life, and declaring him to be “the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry.” Even docile Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, dares to defy her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, to whom she is totally beholden. In the face of his anger, she refuses to marry Henry Crawford, and has to bear his lengthy condemnation and the consequences: “Self-willed, obstinate, selfish and ungrateful. He thought her all this. She had deceived his expectations; she had lost his good opinion. What was to become of her?”

Elizabeth Bennet even believes it was her bad behaviour that caused Darcy to fall in love with her. When Darcy cannot recall exactly what set him off, Lizzie jogs his memory:

“My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my manners – my behaviour to you was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?”

“For the liveliness of your mind, I did.”

“You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less. The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking of your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them. Had you not been really amiable you would have hated me for it; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just; and in your heart, you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously courted you. There – I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it; and really, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable. To be sure, you knew no actual good of me – but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.”

“Was there no good in your affectionate behaviour to Jane, while she was ill at Netherfield?”

“Dearest Jane! Who could have done less for her? But make a virtue of it by all means. My good qualities are under your protection, and you are to exaggerate them as much as possible; and, in return, it belongs to me to find occasions for teasing and quarrelling with you as often as may be…”

“Style like this,” writes Nabokov, “is not Austen’s invention, nor is it even an English invention: I suspect it really comes from French literature where it is profusely represented in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Austen did not read French but got the epigrammatic rhythm from the pert, precise, and polished kind of style which was the fashion. Nevertheless, she handles it to perfection.” •

Retired ABC broadcaster Jill Kitson lives in the Blue Mountains.

THE last letters exchanged between the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner of nearly forty years, the tenor Peter Pears, are profoundly touching. They are reprinted in the sixth and final volume of Britten’s letters, Letters from a Life, and also, in facsimile, in a new volume, Lucy Walker’s Britten in Pictures. There’s something about seeing the words handwritten on crumpled aerograms that only adds to their poignancy.

In November 1974, Pears was singing Britten’s final opera, Death in Venice, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The composer, prevented from travelling by the heart disease that would kill him two years later, was at home in England when he heard a BBC radio broadcast of the two of them performing his settings of Thomas Hardy. He wrote to Pears, “I have just listened to a re-broadcast of Winter Words… and honestly you are the greatest artist that ever was – every nuance, subtle + never over-done – those great words, so sad + wise, painted for one, that heavenly sound you make, full but always coloured for words + music. What have I done to deserve such an artist and man to write for?”

Pears replied: “You say things which turn my heart over with love and pride… But you know love is blind, and what you do not see is that it is you who have given me everything… I am here as your mouthpiece and I live in your music.”

So it was a symbiotic musical relationship, the singer inspiring the composer, the composer making the singer’s career. But it was also a very odd voice. I happen to love it, but there are plenty of people who can’t abide the sound. Not so long ago I played a short recording featuring Pears on The Music Show and we received a rare complaint from a listener.

Britten seems to have been inspired by odd voices – that singular contralto Kathleen Ferrier was another of them – but Pears is special because so much of Britten’s vocal music is tailored to it. Pears’s voice, which reminded mutual friends of Britten’s mother’s singing voice, was quite heady, even slightly nasal, and it came with a generous vibrato. It was not one of those singer vibratos that can’t be switched off: Pears had complete control over it, but he used it liberally. His voice also became a little drier with the passing years and gathered a range of affectations. But the major idiosyncrasy, which was there from the start, was the great vocal strength that Pears found around the note E, precisely the spot at which many tenor voices have a weakness. The famous aria from Peter Grimes, “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades,” starts on E, remains there for the entire first line and keeps returning to it.

Because Britten knew this voice so intimately, it entered his musical thinking early on, and as the voice changed so Britten subtly adapted his approach to writing for it, always showing off its strengths. This means that for someone today singing the role of Grimes, say, or Albert in Albert Herring, or Captain Vere in Billy Budd, or Aschenbach in Death in Venice, there is a problem. And it’s the same in the great song cycles from Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo to Who Are These Children?, from the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings to the Nocturne. It is not simply that he must decide whether to listen to the famous recordings sung by the man for whom the pieces were written, usually with the composer providing his seal of approval at the piano or on the conductor’s podium. It is not even the knowledge that when Britten imagined this music, the sound he heard in his head was Pears. It is more fundamental. Pears’s voice is actually written into the notes and so it is hard not to sound a bit like him.

It is now twenty-six years since the tenor died – though older than the composer, he outlived him by a decade – and thirty-three years since he stopped singing, so today’s tenors, most of whom have no first-hand experience of Pears’s voice, are better placed than their forebears to find their own way through this music. With Britten’s centenary falling this year, there’s certainly a lot of that music to be sung.

Ian Bostridge is the best-known and most successful of this new generation, and his latest CD of Britten’s songs shows a tenor voice going its own way, maturing nicely and always approaching the music afresh. There are myriad little touches in these interpretations that are all Bostridge’s own. Another tenor who has a wonderfully open – one might almost say innocent – approach to the songs is James Gilchrist. It’s such an unaffected voice he makes you hear the music and words as though for the first time.

But the new CD that most surprises me has Gerald English, back in 1969, singing the Serenade with the German horn player Hermann Baumann and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the great John Barbirolli. It’s a German radio recording, never before available, and the performance is remarkable because it shows that even in Britten’s lifetime it was possible to rethink his music. This is such a different interpretation from the classic recorded accounts with Pears. English’s voice is rounder, more lyrical and more conventionally beautiful, though it lacks nothing in sheer dramatic power (even if, at the start, he sounds a little distant). His customary perfect diction is also on show. I worked with English quite a lot in the 1980s and 90s, and the diction was always crystal clear.

Barbirolli, too, goes his own way, as was his wont. The Tennyson setting, “The splendour falls on castle walls,” is quite extraordinarily slow until it reaches the “Blow, bugle, blow” refrain when it is quite extraordinarily swift. I have never heard such a radical reimagining of a Britten song, and one wonders whether the BBC broadcast the concert. If he heard it, what did Britten think? What, for that matter, did Pears think? •

Composer Andrew Ford presents The Music Show at 10 am and 10 pm each Saturday on ABC Radio National.

Rethinking Social Justice: From “Peoples” to “Populations”
By Tim Rowse
Aboriginal Studies Press | $39.95

INDIGENOUS policy remains one of the shoutiest areas of Australian public life, with views seldom held tentatively or modified in the light of observation or experience. Among certain non-Indigenous critics, opinions are gripped as a marker of ideological correctness to the point of whitening knuckles. Among Indigenous intellectuals and activists, attitudes towards such controversial matters as the federal Intervention are a marker of something like Aboriginal authenticity, with the urban– rural divide playing a fundamental role. To criticise the Intervention is supposedly to reveal that one is a privileged urban Aborigine, out of touch with the problems of people in the bush. Or, if you’re white, you’re an intellectual wedded to “leftist” policies aimed at appeasing your conscience rather than solving real-world problems. Sometimes, the accusations are even less restrained, so that Boris Frankel’s criticisms of Marcia Langton’s recent Boyer Lectures were greeted with the dubious accusation from Langton that they reflected “racism.”

In an age when the instruments for measuring populations and testing policies are more sophisticated and sensitive than ever, alarmingly few people seem open to rational, evidence-based argument. That’s one reason why Tim Rowse’s Rethinking Social Justice: From “Peoples” to “Populations” is so welcome. Rowse isn’t shouty. Indeed, the more ideologically charged participants in debates about Indigenous policy may well find frustrating his apparent lack of commitment to an entrenched position and his reluctance to provide clear-cut answers to complex problems. But these habits might just as easily be treated as a source of strength. This is a scholar who, in adjudicating the dispute between Keith Windschuttle and Peter Read over the size of the Stolen Generations, can write: “Until we see an informed rebuttal of Windschuttle, then I suggest that we cease citing Read’s estimates for New South Wales and use Windschuttle’s estimate for New South Wales: 2600 ‘in care.’ Given Windschuttle’s tendency to methodological and emotional parsimony, I suggest that we treat his figure as a minimum.”

This advice sits in a detailed chapter on the ambiguities and difficulties of the term “Stolen Generations,” which make calculating numbers a fraught, if not impossible, task. As Rowse explains, the term “is becoming metonymic: what happened to certain people signifies what happened to many more. The Stolen Generations have become an allegory of colonisation itself, evoking many different experiences of colonising authority.” To recognise as much, however, is not to deny injustice, and Rowse concludes that we know enough to be certain “that the state’s interference in Indigenous family life was so widespread, persistent and negative in its effects” as to warrant the apology of 2008.

Rowse’s chapter on “The Politics of Enumerating the Stolen Generations” in many ways captures his method, purpose and basic thrust as well as any other. He might articulate a dispassionate argument based on the evidence, but his approach is not therefore passionless. Rather, Rowse’s close attention to a small fragment of the Australian population quietly registers the overwhelming moral importance of its experience to Australia’s identity and standing as a settler nation.

Rowse’s distinction between “peoples” and “populations” is the thread that ties together the book’s eleven chapters. In Australian public thought and language today, he suggests, Aboriginal people comprise both a “people” and a “population.” But it is analytically possible and necessary to distinguish between these two senses. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprise a self-conscious collectivity with its own “legal and governmental heritage,” a “people” able to claim certain rights. Yet they are also a “population” whose members’ experiences can be measured by a state increasingly adept at producing statistical data on health, life expectancy, employment, educational attainment and so on. This distinction helps us to see what is missing in prescriptions such as John Howard’s “practical reconciliation” or even in calls to “close the gap.”

While the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous experience in terms of, say, employment or life expectancy might seem amenable to purely objective statistical measures, Rowse insists that all theory is value-laden. So when policymakers talk of “closing the gap” on “economic participation” they are faced with the problem that Community Development Employment Projects, which run exclusively in remote communities, don’t generate non-Indigenous rates of participation. There, the notion of “closing the gap” makes little sense, just as it fails to deal adequately with regional variation within states and territories when it relies on averages across a jurisdiction.

Most fundamentally, “closing the gap” has nothing to tell us about governance: what, Rowse asks, is “the quality of political engagement between Australian governments and Indigenous people?” It is at this point that the distinction between “peoples” and “populations” becomes clearest, for to talk of Aboriginal governance is to talk about a “people” assumed to have a right to a say in their own future through political forms they have some role in devising. The status that “closing the gap” has achieved in national political discourse about Aboriginal social justice, says Rowse, has sidelined this political dimension.

RETHINKING Social Justice contains a number of chapters devoted to individual commentators on Aboriginal affairs. Rowse’s refusal to engage in personal abuse of those with whom he disagrees is most evident here, especially when it is clear that he is unable to accept the argument being advanced, and possibly even more so when he feels that an author’s rhetorical framing obscures the weaknesses in his or her case. His treatment of the anthropologist Peter Sutton’s The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus (2009) is especially notable in this regard.

For Sutton, the “liberal consensus” is the set of ideas and policies that came to dominate Aboriginal affairs between 1968 and 2000 — in other words, the set of policies that John Howard’s government eventually rejected. Rowse accepts that his own views have been formed partly by this “consensus,” and concedes that he has tended to overestimate the Indigenous capacity for “self-determination” and to see Aboriginal failure in this respect as marginal or as a legacy of colonialism destined eventually to fade away. For Sutton, by contrast, the lack of progress reflects enduring and unhelpful characteristics of traditional Aboriginal culture — such as poor child-rearing — combined with policies that were tolerant or even welcoming of such practices.

Rowse is clearly unsatisfied with Sutton’s argument. Just how important, he asks, are cultural practices compared with the other factors that contribute to problems in remote communities? He also argues that Sutton underplays two critical aspects of “the liberal consensus”: the way its confrontation with racial discrimination was actually the culmination of the assimilation policies promoted by a Liberal minister in the Menzies government, Paul Hasluck; and the way it accepted the need for government funding to overcome disadvantage, which made Aboriginal policy vulnerable to claims that money was being wasted on people who did not deserve special assistance. Here, Rowse suggests, Aboriginal policy was, on the one hand, more continuous with the pre-1968 past than implied by Sutton and, on the other, vulnerable at the point of its alleged ascendancy. Its strategy of handing over public resources in order to assist vulnerable people was, moreover, open to objection at a time when there was growing hostility to state welfare in general.

Rowse also has broader concerns about Sutton’s argument. He was surprised, he says, that Sutton presents the “liberal consensus” as “a stupid structure of perception and feeling” in “so many scornfully worded pages.” Given the passions unleashed by the Intervention, though, and the shouty nature of discussion of Indigenous policy in this country, I’m not sure Rowse’s surprise is really warranted. He doesn’t suggest that it is illegitimate for Sutton to depend on his own witness (and grief) in order to lend his book reliability, but in his exposure of this aspect of Sutton’s method and rhetoric I sensed Rowse’s uneasiness about the extent to which the anthropologist’s argument rests on anecdotes derived from his own extensive experience among Aboriginal people.

Rowse insists on the diversity of Indigenous circumstance and experience, and on this basis he criticises what he calls “Noel Pearson’s economic history.” Pearson, Rowse shows, has frequently written about the experience of his own people on Cape York and is highly conscious of their particularity. Yet in order to function as a player in a national political context, he has had to construct a more generalised account of Aboriginal peoplehood and populations. Rowse sees problems here: to what extent is Pearson’s account applicable to Aboriginal people in the southern states, with their very different history of settlement?

Rowse also points to important differences between Pearson’s and Sutton’s approaches. Sutton sees the persistence of certain traditional cultural patterns as disabling, producing young Aboriginal people unable to function in either Aboriginal or mainstream communities. In this sense, the problem is the continuing influence and authority of adult Aborigines. Pearson, on the other hand, laments older people’s diminishing authority in the face of challenges from the young. He believes that Aboriginal law and custom exist irrespective of whether they have been acknowledged by settler society, yet they are liable to disappear if Aboriginal people themselves do not act to preserve them. But changes in Indigenous policy since the late 1960s have created a welfare dependency that has undermined custom and law, the authority of elders, and Indigenous psychological resilience and personal discipline. While such policy has appeased the white liberal conscience, says Pearson, it has been deeply damaging to Aboriginal people.

In arguments about the legacy of the policies of the 1960s to 1990s, the figure of H.C. “Nugget” Coombs is never far away. Rowse is Coombs’s biographer, and here he provides a very powerful defence of the distinguished public servant’s approach to Aboriginal policy. Coombs’s critics hold against him the idea that he was engaged in an “experiment,” but for Rowse all policy is fundamentally experimental, and Coombs’s willingness to recognise as much, and to allow himself to be persuaded to change his mind, was a mark of his humility. Coombs saw that the Aboriginal people of the 1960s and 1970s had to adapt themselves to an unfamiliar order. He hoped that through a measure of self-government, and a process of trial and error, they could draw on their traditional culture to negotiate their way through treacherous waters. But he was not dogmatically committed to the policies so often attributed to him. Absurdly, he is sometimes even credited with moving Aboriginal people to remote homelands as part of a romantic socialist agenda.

Despite Rowse’s tolerance of those with whom he strongly disagrees, the economist Helen Hughes surely tries his patience. On the one hand, she advocates an Indigenous policy that would replace collective with individual land title and concentrate remote Aboriginal people in larger towns and settlements to promote Indigenous economic development. On the other, when she’s confronted with an actually existing Aboriginal middle class, she dismisses its members as “Big Men” fattening on the proceeds of their exploitation of other Aborigines and the goodwill of taxpayers. Rowse’s chapter on Hughes’s writings is about as comprehensive a demolition of a shoddy argument as it would be possible to conceive, a project lent even greater weight by his willingness to concede the occasional point, such as her argument about the need for great financial accountability by Aboriginal organisations.

ROWSE explores ideas largely through the individuals who have developed them — Hasluck, Ted Strehlow, A.P. Elkin, Coombs, Don Dunstan, Read,Windschuttle, Hughes, Pearson and Sutton. As in his earliest work on Australian liberalism, this is a study of ideas through careful interpretation of the writings of their bearers. He pursues the manifold meanings of social justice, and explores intellectuals’ sometimes troubled efforts to grapple with the challenges of accommodating both the difference suggested by peoplehood and the sameness associated with citizenship. He is not the type to construct policy blueprints and, to the extent that he makes recommendations at all, they are modest and tentative. He is rightly sceptical about Hughes’s schemes of social engineering because of her apparent unwillingness to grapple with the consequences of her proposals. Where and how will these more concentrated populations be created? What kinds of responses would such a policy evoke in those places? How would such problems be managed?

Rowse’s modesty in relation to policy is not just a personal trait. It is also a considered position, outlined most eloquently in his chapter on “The Coombs Experiment.” I think that Rowse, like Coombs, would see himself as operating on the basis of “limited knowledge” and “frail conjecture.” His engagement with each author and text recognises that evidence- based argument has the potential to be enabling, placing anyone engaged in Indigenous affairs in 2013 in an advantageous position compared with a Hasluck or a Coombs. This will strike some as a strangely old-fashioned faith. But among the writings about Australian history and society that I’ve encountered, I can recall no more eloquent case than this one for the progressive potential of rational, evidence-based argument in the social sciences. •

Frank Bongiorno is a historian based at the Australian National University, and a national board member of the Australian Fabians.

A House in Flanders
By Michael Jenkins
Slightly Foxed | £12

SIR MICHAEL JENKINS, who died last month at the age of seventy-seven, was far from being a public figure, but he was nevertheless a man of some influence in the world. He is characterised in his obituary in the London Telegraph as “a skilful behind-the-scenes operator and a negotiator of considerable finesse.” These qualities were displayed in two highly successful careers: the first in diplomacy, culminating in his posting as Britain’s ambassador to the Netherlands from 1988 to 1993, and the second in investment banking, from which he went on to play an active role on the boards of various multinationals, and thence to continue in an advisory capacity until his death. Jenkins combined the instincts of the envoy with those of the entrepreneur, ensuring his success in both these worlds. It was the kind of success that is recognised from within, but barely noticed without – his energies were expended in the background, advising and facilitating and smoothing the way. He made an important contribution, for example, in the early days of Britain’s entry to the Common Market, serving for a time as chef de cabinet to one of the two British commissioners. But in among advising and facilitating and making other people look good, Jenkins also found time to write two books.

Arakcheev: Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire, appeared in 1969. Jenkins, who had learnt Russian during the war and studied it further at Cambridge, undertook his research for the biography while on post in Moscow, when he was still in his twenties and when the restrictions placed by the Soviets on embassy staff meant that he had time at his disposal. For a man whose professional duties required a certain self-effacement, Arakcheev was an interesting choice of subject. Military supremo under Alexander I, Arakcheev, who had a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty (and formidable efficiency), was anything but self-effacing. But despite the larger-than-life nature of its subject, the book did not really find its mark. For scholars, it was not scholarly enough (“light and unsubstantial” was the judgement of one academic reviewer) and for the general reader the name Arakcheev itself was unlikely to stand out on the biography shelves. Arakcheev has thus gone the way of much historical biography, noticed on first appearance, but soon overtaken by the next wave, to be relegated in due course to the category of books available secondhand for a notional sum, one that hovers just above zero, plus postage.

It was three decades before Jenkins published again, and this time it was a memoir. A House in Flanders recalls the postwar summer he spent as a fourteen-year-old with an oddly assorted family in northern France, in their grand if faded country house that stood splendidly alone on the Flanders Plain. The mysterious connection between his own family – his parents, who are hardly present in the narrative, are described, as far as they are described at all, as cold and overly intellectual, and we discover only in passing that he has a younger brother – and the French family with whom he feels immediately at home, lies at the heart of the book, raising in an unforced way all kinds of questions about what it means to belong to a family, and what exactly is the nature of heritage.

A House in Flanders, which first appeared in 1992, was reissued in hardback (“with the addition of new material”) in 2010 by the publishing arm of the journal Slightly Foxed, resulting in a sufficiently encouraging reception to justify this new paperback edition. It is now getting on for ten years since Slightly Foxed began as a beautifully produced quarterly consisting of articles about unjustly neglected or forgotten books. Printed on cream paper and with commissioned illustrations on the cover, Slightly Foxed, with its knowingly retro yet up-to-date feel, caught the beginnings of what has become an ever-growing interest in recovered works, in books that have been pretty much buried by the ever-increasing tide of newness and are now in need of rescue. In tune with this trend, reissues have become another form of newness, supporting one of the major platforms of publishing, from Classics lists issued by the major imprints, to print-on-demand options, right through to facsimile editions of out-of-print works, churned out by companies with odd names and made available through Amazon. In the gaps are the smaller publishers, looking to build a loyal following through a combination of literary discernment and high production values.

In supplementing its periodical base by entering the reissue market, Slightly Foxed has chosen to focus in much of its list on a certain kind of autobiographical voice – elegiac, observant, stoical, quietly humorous. It is a voice that runs counter to the continuing fashion for misery memoirs (a fashion that seems to have been as much fuelled as checked by revelations surrounding the “truth” of many of these harrowing accounts of blighted lives) and it is a voice that is easy to get wrong. The quotation on the inside cover of A House in Flanders, taken from Dirk Bogarde’s over-egged review of the original edition, does not bode well in this regard: “a radiant book, a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love.” Yet for all its dreamlike evocation of a long-ago summer, A House in Flanders is not the escapist son et lumière that this description suggests. Jenkins alludes to misery aplenty – to thwarted lives, to unhappy marriages, to the cruelties of war and the inevitability, for those whose lives are not cut short by violence, of mental and physical decline. Even within the comforting walls of the house in Flanders, there is, rising from the underground cesspit, a “weak but identifiable stench, inadequately masked by scent.”

A House in Flanders is tightly structured, each of the fourteen chapters concentrating on a particular inhabitant or familiar of the house, many of them elderly, and all of them presided over in one way or another by the matriarchal but childless Tante Yvonne, who is given both the first chapter and the last. The narrator’s younger self gains access, in an unobtrusively contrived way, to the thoughts and the behaviour of all these people; he is around when the crucial words are said or looks exchanged between lovers, he is invited along as a companion on private errands, he catches glimpses over a hedge or through a doorway, he is entrusted, in the manner of the young boy in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), with the delivery of secret messages. A House in Flanders is a book about the attractions and impossibility of keeping things as they are, and the attractions, in the face of the many ways in which life can go wrong, of routine and predictability. “I would have given everything,” says Jenkins, “for time to stand still.” (It is a sure hand that places “everything” rather than “anything” into that sentence.) Everyone has a book in them, it is said. Michael Jenkins had two, and one of them, A House in Flanders, is a real find. •

Richard Johnstone is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. His paperback reviews appear monthly in Inside Story.

LOUD music blares from the Riverside Bar at the back of the Todd Tavern as a security guard passes a metal-detection wand over each person seeking to enter. It’s 1.45 on a weekday afternoon in Alice Springs, and the bar has been open for nearly four hours.

Minutes later, the guard ushers out a jumble of people, all Aboriginal, who then congregate around the edges of the pub’s driveway as if waiting for a public event. By five to two, about eight vehicles are lined up in the driveway of the bottleshop. First in the queue are two eight-seater minibuses, full of Aboriginal people. “We accept BasicsCard,” a small green sign announces on the side of one of the vehicles. On the other side of the pub, Aboriginal people wave down taxicabs coming off Todd Causeway so they can buy grog from the drive-through bottleshop. Entry on foot is prohibited.

At two, the roller doors rattle up and the sales commence. The door of the Riverside Bar is locked, as the next shift selling cheap grog begins.

THE Todd Tavern’s Riverside Bar and the Gap View Hotel’s side bar are probably the most notorious public expressions of problem drinking in Alice Springs. A hangover from the days of racially segregated drinking, the two “animal bars,” as locals call them, serve a crush of mainly Aboriginal drinkers excluded by the dress regulations and prices from the pubs’ main bars. Drinking at the animal bars begins at 10 am – they are the only places in town where alcohol is served this early – and continues until the small stampede to the bottleshop at 2 pm.

The Gap View and Todd Tavern were the only two liquor outlets that refused to join the retailers’ accord signed in mid 2011 by Coles, Woolworths and the IGA supermarkets in Alice Springs to reduce harmful drinking in town. The accord introduced a floor price of $1.20 per standard drink for takeaway alcohol and removed casks, cleanskins and some fortified wines from the shelves.

Along with the Heavitree Gap Tavern, the two pubs did agree a couple of years ago to refuse entry to anyone on the Banned Drinkers Register, but business took a dive. Introduced in 2008 as part of the Alice Springs Alcohol Management Plan, which had been in operation since 2006, the BDR supported existing measures to reduce takeaway alcohol – 70 per cent of alcohol sales in Alice Springs – by restricting the sale of wine in containers of more than two litres, and bottles of fortified wine, to one purchase per person per day between the hours of 6 and 9 pm. The BDR listed people who had been taken into police custody drunk and disorderly three times in three months or had committed an alcohol-related offence. Alcohol could be bought at takeaway outlets only after a driver’s licence or photo identification was scanned in order to check whether the buyer had exceeded his or her quota of alcohol products, or was on the BDR.

With 800 of Central Australia’s drinkers listed on the register and unable to purchase alcohol, the impact on the animal bars was undoubtedly significant. “I was in those bars in September after the BDR was scrapped,” says Bob Durnan, a community development worker in Central Australia for over thirty years, “and you’d ask the security blokes how many people had been on the BDR, and they would say, ‘Oh yeah. Twenty, or fifty, or lots of people.’”

In May 2011, as part of its “Enough Is Enough” alcohol reforms, the Territory’s former Labor government extended the operation of the BDR beyond the alcohol management plans of Alice Springs, Gove and Groote Eylandt to include 2500 drinkers across the Territory. Announcing the package, the Labor attorney-general, Delia Lawrie, acknowledged that “alcohol is the biggest cause of crime in the Territory with 60 per cent of all assaults and 67 per cent of all domestic violence incidents involving alcohol, costing our community an estimated $642 million a year.” That figure represents $4197 for every adult Territorian, almost four-and-a-half times the national figure of $944 per adult, and includes costs incurred by health and medical emergency services, police, the courts and corrective services, and loss of workplace productivity, but not the social cost of alcohol abuse’s contribution to intergenerational poverty and disadvantage.

Alcohol consumption in the Northern Territory, and in Alice Springs in particular, has long been notoriously high. In 2000, prior to the implementation of a series of alcohol management initiatives in Alice Springs, Central Australians drank an average of 17.65 litres of pure alcohol per person each year, 1.76 times the national average. But by 2008, according to a study conducted last year by the National Drug Research Institute, that figure had decreased to an estimated 13.75 litres of pure alcohol per person, 1.25 times the national average, and alcohol-related assaults and hospital admissions had also fallen. The study attributed these trends to the effectiveness of price-related strategies in Alice Springs to reduce overall alcohol consumption by facilitating a switch from cask wine to beer.

The study also found that at least one of three other initiatives – enforcement of the “one per person per day” restriction, the introduction of ID cards, and the alcopops tax – had significant effects in reducing consumption, but the coincidence of these reforms made it hard to say which had been most effective. Nevertheless, the use of ID scans accompanying the BDR appeared to have reinforced measures to limit the quantity of specific alcohol products purchased by individuals each day.

ALCOHOL is a focus of public policy and media attention in the Territory to an extent that is unknown in any other state. It plays a central role in defining the Territorian identity and lifestyle, and underpins the local tourism and hospitality industries. But on the other side of this coin are the massive personal, social and economic costs incurred by excessive drinking. These costs make alcohol one of the trigger points, along with the related issues of crime and public disorder, that Territorian politicians use to galvanise and polarise local opinion.

In the lead-up to last year’s Territory election, the BDR became a rallying point after opposition leader Terry Mills announced that scrapping the register would form the centrepiece of the law-and-order platform of the Country Liberal Party, or CLP. In a sense, the BDR became emblematic of the ideological schism in Territorian policy debates between an approach that favours liberalising alcohol sales and slating responsibility for alcohol reform to the individual, and an approach that involves community-wide measures to minimise the harms and social costs accompanying heavy drinking. Labor’s Enough Is Enough package and other locally based strategies reflected the alternative view to the CLP’s.

Appealing to populist, libertarian sentiment, the CLP presented the BDR as an encroachment on the civil liberties of the average Territorian. In reality, the ID scans accompanying the BDR were a minor inconvenience, especially given that carrying a licence was already a prerequisite for driving through a bottleshop in the Territory. The CLP claimed, however, that the BDR unfairly affected the majority of responsible drinkers and “not just the problem drunks” – a euphemism for Aboriginal drinkers. But problem drinking, according to the National Drug Research Institute’s Dennis Gray, extends across the Centralian population. “If Indigenous drinking is factored out per capita, consumption by the non-Indigenous people in Central Australia is still about 52 per cent higher than the national average,” says Gray. “Rates would still be up there, if every Aboriginal person stopped drinking in the NT tomorrow.”

Russell Goldflam, president of the Criminal Lawyers Association of the Northern Territory, says, “The BDR, so the CLP claimed, was nanny-state interference with the right to drink. Had they been elected by suburban voters, they’d be fairly entitled to claim that they were elected with a mandate to protect and restore this purported right to drink.” But that wasn’t the case, says Goldflam. “They won the election by winning a swag of bush seats, seats in which the great majority of voters live in dry areas, communities which at the request of local residents had been declared dry by the Licensing Commission years before the Intervention imposed similar restrictions on them.”

“It was aiming at the bloke in the pub, whom they thought would give them his vote,” says Gerry Wood, the independent MP for the Top End electorate of Nelson. “Perhaps they were hoping that it would be part of a combination of sweeteners, including reform of local government and some money for outstations, that would win them the bush seat.”

The day after the CLP’s election win, the new chief minister began making good on his party’s “number one pledge” to dismantle the BDR. Ostensibly, this gesture was meant to usher in a new focus on tackling alcohol-fuelled crime and anti-social behaviour. Plans included increasing policing, rolling out a “genuine mandatory rehabilitation program” using prison farms for alcohol detoxification and treatment, and potentially relaxing restrictions in remote Indigenous communities to reintroduce licensed social clubs.

The need for a crackdown on crime and public disorder, especially drunkenness, and admonitions for increased policing and tougher sentencing are familiar CLP catch-cries. But beyond the reasonable request for citizens to live in safe and secure houses and streets, what these law-and-order platforms often hide is the reluctance of Territory and local governments to provide adequate accommodation for itinerant Aboriginal people, particularly from remote communities, in cities and regional centres. The CLP’s proposals for building prison farms for drunks and boot camps for offending youths also has uncomfortable echoes of the expansion of jails in the United States to accommodate lower socioeconomic groups.

THE dismantling of the Banned Drinkers Register has been accompanied by reports of increases in public drunkenness. Proponents of the BDR claim these add to the mountain of anecdotal evidence about its effectiveness in conjunction with other alcohol measures previously applied by Labor, and that this strengthens the case for further evaluation of the scheme.

“They’re drinking like hell. Young kids, grown-ups, older people. They’re going mad on drinks now,” says Christobel Swan, a Central Arrernte elder. “It’s still happening. They’re just going in there, whatever time they want, to get grog. Whereas before they used to have those things [licence scans], you know.”

Many of the complaints have come from the Top End, especially from shopkeepers and publicans in Darwin, as public drunkenness and humbugging became noticeable around supermarkets and hotels again. In March this year, the Anglican Dean of Darwin announced he was leaving his position because “the situation changed overnight” after the BDR was abolished, making life around the cathedral grounds intolerable. Trevor Riley, the chief justice of the Northern Territory Supreme Court, made what some interpreted as a veiled reference to the scrapping of the BDR by requesting further restrictions in his sentencing remarks in an alcohol-related domestic violence case in Central Australia.

“Regrettably, based upon my experience in the courts, the situation is getting worse rather than improving,” said the chief justice. “It is unfortunate and terribly sad, that genuine efforts to curb the flow of alcohol that could address the problems of those who suffer from abuse of alcohol are not pursued.”

Beyond asserting that it was ineffective and displaying sly grog hauls to show that it could be circumvented, the CLP gave few reasons for the removal of the BDR. On-supply of grog by relatives to banned drinkers was frequently claimed to be one of the register’s major loopholes.

“It just didn’t work at all because people still managed to drink,” says Bess Nungarrayi Price, the CLP member for Stuart. “They got other relatives to buy for them. And they just give someone money and say, ‘Look, if you’re going to buy grog, could you buy me a bottle of rum as well? And I’ll give you the money for it.’ That’s how it was worked out.”

Supporters of the BDR, including People’s Alcohol Action Coalition spokesperson and 2012 NT Australian of the Year John Boffa, dispute these claims, arguing that the register was beginning to make a dint in local problem drinking. “People were still buying for their relatives, but the penalties were severe,” says Boffa. “As more and more people got banned, the drinkers’ circles were being affected.”

Once the BDR was abolished, the problem drinkers returned to the animal bars and the bottleshops, and policing outside takeaway outlets became the main response to alcohol abuse. Given the CLP’s emphasis on law and order, this was hardly surprising. Police have the power under a combination of local and federal legislation in Alice Springs to confiscate grog from anyone who can’t provide an adequate explanation of where they’re going to consume it: that is, if it appears that they are likely to drink it in a restricted area such as a town camp or a public place. This power mainly targets Aboriginal people.

“Getting rid of the BDR didn’t decrease the police’s load – it probably increased and spread it further,” says Vince Kelly, president of the NT Police Association. “The view of most police was that it probably didn’t necessarily work in terms of completely stopping access to alcohol or getting people out of the system, but it was just one of a variety of tools that the police had to try and do something about the problem.”

Bob Durnan agrees. “Before the election there was an effective multi-pronged approach, which was starting to look like it might be a very significant part of the answer,” he observes, citing the combined impact of measures – some specific to Alice Springs – such as the BDR, the drug-and-alcohol-focused SMART Court, the Alcohol and Other Drugs Tribunal and the retailers’ accord. “People were saying, now all these programs, like the Safe and Sober program and getting people to do training for jobs and other prevention and intervention and community development programs, they were starting to be effective,” says Durnan. “There were enough people from the core problem group who were now sober enough, much of the time, that you could actually work with them, with some chance to achieve the aims of the programs with them. But now that has slipped right back.”

PART of the problem is that the BDR was scrapped too hastily to permit proper evaluation. As retrospective proof that the CLP had been right to abolish the register, the Territory’s new chief minister, Adam Giles, produced crime statistics for the December 2012 quarter which indicated that alcohol-fuelled assaults had dropped by almost 6 per cent compared to the same quarter the previous year, when the BDR was still in operation. Delia Lawrie had made a similar gesture after Labor’s Territory-wide introduction of the BDR, pointing to a quarter’s crime statistics indicating decreases in alcohol-related consumption and harms. Either way, a single quarter isn’t a sufficient period over which to measure the effectiveness of any approach to addressing alcohol abuse.

That much-touted police data also has its limitations, according to John Boffa, because it “responds largely to police activity and not to the incidence and prevalence of alcohol-related crime and problems in the community.” Acting Victoria Police Commissioner Lucinda Nolan has observed that statewide increases in offences against people and property were “driven by us.” In other words, the police were more active and crimes more likely to be reported.

Other data sets, particularly hospital admissions, are needed to give a more comprehensive picture of the impact of the abolition of the BDR. When Boffa and Kon Vatskalis, the Territory’s shadow health minister, reported that Alice Springs hospital staff members had told them privately that the number of intoxicated patients admitted had increased since the BDR had been scrapped, the Territory government refused to make the relevant statistics public. After several weeks of rumours, concerned hospital staff revealed that alcohol-related admissions to the emergency had doubled, rising from around 10 per cent in August 2012 before the CLP was elected to 20 per cent of all admissions in January 2013.

Robyn Lambley, the Territory’s alcohol rehabilitation minister, admitted that the rise in admissions might be related to the abolition of the BDR, but slated most of the increase to a change in police practice since the inquest into the death of Kwementyaye Briscoe in custody last year. Police now take more drunks to Emergency than to the watchhouse.

But the real problem, according to Boffa, is an ongoing reluctance on the part of NT governments – Labor or CLP – to establish longitudinal data sets across a range of indicators tracking the effectiveness of alcohol measures. “Who has the power to allow us to look at that data? The government does,” Boffa says. “If they’re serious, if they want to stand up and say, the BDR didn’t work, then throw open the data and let’s have an independent evaluation and let’s have a look at it.”

Among the voices calling for the BDR to be reinstated are those of prime minister Julia Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott. In late April, Gillard made what some have construed as a veiled threat to withhold Commonwealth funds from proposed educational reforms and tax incentives to support regional development in the Territory, saying there was “no point” if lives and communities were being destroyed by “the tap being turned back on for the alcohol.”

In fact, the only other political leaders in accord with the CLP’s platform on alcohol policy have been in the Queensland Liberal National Party government. Like the CLP, premier Campbell Newman campaigned on a promise to relax alcohol restrictions in remote Aboriginal communities on the basis that they were racially discriminatory. Newman argued that the “right to drink” applied to the Aboriginal worker who wished to “come home to have a beer, sit on the front porch and watch the TV news with their family.”

“Rhetoric about ‘the right to drink’ misleadingly puts it up on some sort of pedestal with such established human rights as the right to free speech, the right to personal liberty and the right to due process,” Russell Goldflam says. “However, access to liquor is not and never has been unregulated. Australian governments have been trying to control the supply and consumption of alcohol ever since 1788. That’s because it can and does cause harm, and in particular because its misuse can and does impinge on the rights of others: the right not to be assaulted, the right of a child to be cared for, the right of road-users not to be crashed into by drunk drivers, and so on.”

ALCOHOL reform – long seen as an unsexy social problem, the province of wowsers – is now increasingly at the forefront of national public health debate. The social and health costs of heavy drinking, especially among young people, have been widely publicised, with tax on alcopops increased to curb some of the excesses of binge drinking, and demands from health groups for bans on alcohol advertising during televised sport. But it’s no stretch to say that Aboriginal leaders, thinkers, organisations and communities have been at the forefront of raising awareness about the effects of alcohol abuse and promoting alcohol policy reforms, especially in remote Australia, over the past few decades.

Between 1979 and 2005, over one hundred Aboriginal communities used provisions under the Northern Territory Liquor Act to enact voluntary dry declarations prohibiting or restricting the possession, sale or consumption of alcohol on their land. Yet the CLP proposed relaxing these restrictions by introducing licensed social clubs or “wet canteens” in communities. (The NT Emergency Response merely extended the land mass covered by existing alcohol restrictions in many cases.) It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this proposal is part of an effort to encourage some itinerant Aboriginal people in the Territory’s cities and towns to move back to their communities to drink.

Late last year, Donna Ah Chee, chief executive officer of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, one of the largest Aboriginal-controlled community organisations in Alice Springs, participated in a Grog Summit of Aboriginal leaders in Darwin in response to the CLP’s call to roll back alcohol restrictions in remote communities.

Ah Chee doesn’t have a problem with the application of alcohol restrictions to remote communities if they are applied as a special measure. “I think it is okay only on the basis that the Aboriginal people who are affected by them have been consulted and approved that discriminatory measure,” she says. “But look, if a community is wanting to introduce a social club or a wet canteen, ultimately it is their decision. Having said that, communities need to be given the information in order to make the right decision, to make an informed decision. It should be on the basis of what works in terms of responsible drinking and ensuring safe communities.” Ah Chee believes that Aboriginal people have already said what they want. “It was clear from the summit in the Top End that the majority of participants there did not want the reintroduction of alcohol into their communities.”

On 12 April, alcohol rehabilitation minister Robyn Lambley announced the other main prong of CLP’s alcohol reforms, a “groundbreaking first” for Australia. At an annual cost of $30 million, problem drinkers will receive mandatory treatment for twelve weeks in secure facilities. By the time the rehabilitation plans were introduced, the idea of building prison farms had been scrapped because of the expense involved. Making the predictable complaint that the previous government didn’t leave it enough surplus to carry out its plans in full, the CLP declared its intention to extend existing rehabilitation facilities in Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine and Nhulunbuy, which added up to an additional 140 beds.

As opposition leader Delia Lawrie observed, the basic maths of the situation didn’t add up: “The CLP have come out with a plan for 140 to be locked up. What will happen to the other 2360 chronic drunks across the Territory” – the balance of numbers on the BDR – “who are being ignored?”

Bess Price puts a slightly different slant on mandatory detox and rehabilitation facilities from what her fellow CLP members offer. “My thoughts have always been about setting up proper healing centres in communities,” she says, “and getting family members involved so they can get through the hard times.” Healing centres will be “something stronger and different, where you make people work and have to think about life and family.” It’s a response that seems in keeping with Price’s former work as a cultural awareness training consultant, and more sympathetic than her comments earlier this year that Territorian Aboriginal families want their young people locked up for safety.

She still maintains her earlier view: “But when young people drink, look what trouble! And by them being in jail, that keeps them away from more trouble.”

For her, the real problem is that jail is “the only thing happening now for reoffenders. You know, they just haven’t been able to set up rehab centres or healing centres out in the communities. That’s where we kind of fail as well, because there’s only one healing centre that’s available, and that’s CAAAPU.” CAAAPU is the Central Australian Aboriginal Alcohol Programmes Unit, the rehabilitation facility in Alice Springs. “And I’ve always said, it doesn’t work for the bush mob, because they just open the door and walk out when they’ve finished and back into it.”

Back into the drinkers’ circles on the streets and riverbanks of Alice Springs, that is, although how long young people might be persuaded to stay away from towns in healing centres on country, were they would be built, is another issue.

One Eastern Arrernte Aboriginal elder sums up the limitations of providing rehabilitation without addressing alcohol supply in Alice Springs. “Having that detox, that CAAAPU there, that’s terrible. If you’re going to have that there, you got to take away the licence from that bottle department, Gap View,” she says. The Gap View Hotel is just inside the Gap, the landmark entrance to Alice Springs and a few kilometres down the road from CAAAPU. “Because they come out from CAAAPU – that place where people sober up – and there’s an open door right in front of you… The big Gap there.” To cut back drinking she would like to see shorter opening hours. “Shorten the time limits for bottle-o, and the pub time should be limited.” She pauses. “You should put a bomb in every pub. Give me a bomb.”

For Donna Ah Chee, while the CLP’s investment in alcohol treatment has been welcome, treatment programs “in and of themselves are not going to make the sort of difference in terms of the high levels of alcohol abuse in our communities.” Among participants in the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress’s Safe and Sober program, for example, only 10 per cent have either reduced their alcohol consumption significantly or ceased drinking altogether.

Rehabilitation “has to be part of the multiple strategies put in place” to address drinking in the Territory, says Ah Chee, along with further reductions in takeaway hours and a no-takeaway day linked to Centrelink payments. Her organisation offers early childhood programs that seek to develop resilience and learning skills to prevent the development of risky and addictive behaviours in later life. But these strategies “can also be complemented at a national level with a volumetric tax.”

“Introducing a floor price at the price of full strength beer is not going to cost the government any money,” Ah Chee says. “So I don’t understand – other than protecting the liquor industry and whether there’s tax revenue – what’s going on. I just think that something could be done tomorrow if there was the political will to reduce alcohol consumption which ultimately is going to reduce harm.”

The lack of political will, reinforced by pressure from CLP supporters including the Australian Hotels Association and local licensees, has left alcohol reform in the Northern Territory in a deadlock. In late April, Adam Giles, in a remarkable tumble turn of pro-industry spin, castigated the Commonwealth for continuing to call on the Territory government to investigate the animal bars and develop a plan for managing all liquor outlets in Alice Springs. Criticising the federal Indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, for “picking on” the bars and “targeting black people,” Giles claimed she must prefer Aboriginal people to be involved in more violent drinking in the nearby riverbed rather than enjoying the “regulated environment” of the animal bars.

John Boffa suggests a more direct approach, based on a story dating back a couple of decades about how the young son of the new publican at the Goldfields Hotel in Tennant Creek, and a few mates, took to the pub’s internal wall with sledgehammers in the middle of the night. The rest of the hotels in Tennant Creek followed suit, demolishing their dividing walls and ending segregated drinking within their bars.

“You only had to do that and you had everyone drinking in the one bar,” Boffa observes, “according to the same standards and requirements. And the Aboriginal mob who were going there just to get drunk didn’t go there any more.”

Similar direct action could reform heavy drinking in Alice Springs, he believes. “That’s what could happen here. We’ve said this to government: all they need to do is forget the BDR, forget everything else. They just need to tell these pubs that their licence will only let them have one public bar, and that would absolutely make a huge difference overnight.”

Eleanor Hogan is a research fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, and author of Alice Springs (NewSouth, 2012).

THIS was supposed to be the “change” election in Malaysia, and in one respect it was: the opposition Pakatan Rakyat coalition, or PR, received a majority of the vote, even if the rural gerrymander means that the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition (National Front, or BN) retains 60 per cent of the seats. But on a lightning trip through all of Malaysia’s states during the two weeks of the campaign, I saw first-hand some of the stark political divisions that cleave Malaysian society and help explain the election outcome.

Some of the most memorable moments came at campaign events in opposition strongholds. In spirited rallies in both Chinese majority urban areas, and in the deeply Malay – and deeply Islamic – city of Kuala Terangganu on the east coast of the Peninsula, the mood for change was palpable. Huge and passionate crowds gathered, responding enthusiastically to the calls of “ubah” (change) and “ini kalilah!” (it’s time!).

But such rallies were also remarkable for how different they were from each other. Along the deeply Islamic east coast, the main opposition party is PAS, the All-Malaysia Islamic Party. At one huge rally we attended in Terengganu state, the crowd was almost entirely Malay; people sat cross-legged on the ground on mats they had brought for the occasion. The drawcard speaker was Azhar Idrus, a popular ustad, or religious teacher, who explained the failings of the government and the necessity for change in an earthy style expressed in an Islamic idiom. In the rallies of the DAP (Democratic Action Party), 90 per cent of the campaign speeches were in the various Chinese languages, and 90 per cent of the crowds were Chinese. There, people sat on plastic stools, or stood.

Forging unity on the flanks

The American political scientist Donald Horowitz has memorably described how the logic of Malaysia’s system produces incompatible “flank” parties within the opposition. With the governing coalition consisting of parties of the Malay, Chinese and Indian elites occupying the middle ground, so this analysis goes, the opposition is driven out to the margins of the ethnic extremes. PAS appeals to a mostly Malay constituency which is disillusioned with the government’s perceived failure to address Malay disadvantage or honour their Islamic religion; Chinese voters who feel the government is discriminating against them turn to the DAP. As a result, and put very crudely, Malaysian elections often have a sort of pendulum logic to them: when the opposition mood strikes the Malays, Chinese voters fear resurgent Malay nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism might harm their interests, and so support the government. The same logic operates in reverse: when the Chinese desert the government, Malays tend to swing back.

Since 1999, however, the opposition parties have been attempting to overcome this logic and to forge cross-ethnic unity. The elections this year marked a definite step forward in this process, with the Pakatan Rakyat coalition able to constitute a coherent alliance that agreed to avoid three-cornered fights and pool resources to campaign for single candidates in almost all constituencies. It promoted an alternative discourse about national politics, trying to shift the debate away from sectional and ethnic representation toward a focus on the government’s corruption and economic management, and trying to forge a new style of pan-racial and pan-religious politics. (On the latter, see Amrita Malhi’s recent analysis for Inside Story.) Some of the most striking moments on the campaign trail involved Malay volunteers campaigning on behalf of DAP candidates and Chinese volunteers working for their Malay opposition partners.

To be sure, the BN tried hard to break this model and apply the old logic of ethnic politics. In particular, its advertisements and campaign speeches directed at Chinese voters tried to play up fears about PAS, warning of the dangers of Islamic extremism if the opposition won. In what was a blatant scare campaign, Chinese voters were warned that a vote for the DAP equalled a vote for PAS.

The campaign to scare the Chinese failed: urban Chinese voters largely deserted the BN, and DAP did the best of all the opposition parties, winning thirty-eight seats, up from twenty-eight in 2013. Prime minister Najib Razak has since described the government’s losses in this election as being the result of a “Chinese tsunami” and warned that “polarised” voting trends would be “dangerous” for the country. At one level, the analysis is accurate, for it is clear that Chinese majority urban areas deserted the BN at a higher rate than other regions. But one of the most striking aspects of the DAP’s campaigning was how it targeted issues with broad national rather than sectional appeal. All the talk at the DAP rallies I observed (at least so far as Chinese dialect speakers could tell me) was about national issues like corruption and economic policy that were relevant to all Malaysians. It was the BN campaign that was more ethnically targeted, either trying to stoke Chinese fears or highlighting specific policies benefiting Chinese voters in areas such as education. It’s thus easy to understand why many Chinese Malaysians say they feel insulted by the PM’s analysis.

Machine and money politics

What about the Malay vote? In one important preliminary analysis, US political scientist Tom Pepinsky suggests that Malays were much more likely to vote for the BN. Indeed, he argues that “almost 61 per cent of the variation in the two-party vote share going to the Barisan Nasional candidate can be predicted by knowing just what percentage of the district’s population is Malay… and nothing more.” What we don’t know yet is how much of this can be put down to the urban–rural divide. Rural areas on the Malay Peninsula are predominantly Malay, and it’s in these areas that the gerrymander acts most strongly in the government’s favour, and where the machine of UMNO (United Malays National Organisation) and the BN is strongest. To be sure, government campaigners in these areas made a lot of securing Malay political hegemony (as the photo above shows). But in the Malay heartland (and in rural Sabah and Sarawak, too, where the BN had a clean sweep) this election seemed much more a story of old-fashioned machine politics than a story about ethnicity.

Thus, as well as the opposition rallies mentioned above, some of the most arresting moments on the campaign trail came when we attended BN meetings in rural areas. While the opposition emphasised mass meetings in the towns, these BN gatherings tended to be small-scale meetings in villages off the main roads. Rather than being lively and passionate, here the atmosphere was cosy and intimate. Most people knew each other well, and the speeches tended to be laid-back, with lots of jokes and local references. Speakers tried to lead those attending in chants, but often attendees could not be much bothered to respond enthusiastically. The impression was of people who were much more interested in the free food (and there was typically plenty of that) and the opportunity for social chit-chat than they were in the political messages being conveyed.

And yet, in these rather lackadaisical events lay the key to the BN’s victory. These meetings, run by the local UMNO branches and their women’s wing (Wanita), are the visible tip of a party machine that reaches into the very heart of rural Malay society. We were told repeatedly that the government’s machinery adopts a personalised approach to campaigning. UMNO party workers know who’s who in the village: they keep lists of voters, assigning them to three groups – “white” (loyal to the BN), “black” (pro-opposition) and “grey,” or on the fence.

This is an impressive path to electoral victory. Party workers make sure they get the “white” voters to the booths on voting day. As one BN candidate told us on the east coast: if you are the BN worker assigned to look after a fisherman who happens to be out at sea that day, you had better make sure you are waiting on the jetty to whisk him to the polling booth as soon as he lands. Volunteers work on the “grey” voters on an individual basis, identifying and tackling the reasons for their doubts, helping them out if they are in need, and going through sympathetic family members if all else fails. Interestingly, it is very often the members of the women’s wing of UMNO and other BN parties who carry out this work. They are the people who know the village households the best.

And this machine is primarily a rural phenomenon, a system that feeds on the personal, face-to-face relationships that sustain rural life, but that struggles to survive in the more anonymous and mobile setting of the towns. Indeed, it’s notable that the DAP – the party of the (largely) Chinese urban middle class – lacks this sort of infrastructure. Of all the opposition parties, the rural-based PAS is the only one to have a similarly deeply rooted party machine, and one that also relies on its women’s auxiliary to get out the vote in the villages.

Not that the BN machine is simply a social club. It is a machine that is greased by money, and plenty of it. Though nobody in the BN parties would admit to vote buying, it was obvious that the meetings we attended were partly about delivery of material benefits to voters. Free meals and lucky door prizes were a prominent part of meetings, and the broader campaigning went hand-in-hand with delivery of other goods (in one constituency we visited, the government had just handed out free laptops to schoolchildren). And then there were the government handouts such as the BR1M (One Malaysia People’s Assistance) program, through which poor households were paid 500 ringgit (A$165) each in the lead-up to the election, and a host of other voucher and subsidy schemes that were integrated into the BN’s re-election strategy.

In fact, voters who are on the receiving end of such largesse sometimes seem to take a frankly calculating attitude. In one campaign stop in the town of Sibu, in Sarawak, members of our team watched the BN candidate (a wealthy Chinese tycoon) visit a little Malay community at their mosque. The mosque committee didn’t beat about the bush: they told the candidate he could rely on their 400 votes, but then listed the various mosque repairs and renovations they expected in return. The meeting took place in a spacious new community hall which they had gained during the recent by-election there; as one of their members told us, “Elections are a good time to ask for projects.” There’s no point in inviting opposition candidates to such events, he explained, because “they have no money.” In the event, the BN candidate lost in this seat, but this was a primarily Chinese constituency, and he presumably did reasonably well among the Malay voters.

Often, Malaysia’s politics is written about as if ethnicity is the only thing that matters. Viewed from the rural hinterland, politics look rather different. Viewed up close, it is machine politics and the mobilisation of money that make all the difference, and that constitute the key for the BN’s victory. These ingredients have long proven a reliable formula for success, but as Malaysia’s population becomes gradually more urban, more prosperous and more internet-savvy, the BN could be painting itself into an ever-narrowing corner. •

Edward Aspinall is Professor of Politics in the Department of Political and Social Change in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. He thanks Terence Gomez and Surinderpal Kaur from the University of Malaya, and Meredith Weiss from the SUNY Albany, for their wisdom and guidance on their trip together through the Malaysian election. He also thanks the ANU’s Centre for Democratic Institutions for funding the research on “Money Politics in Southeast Asia” of which this trip was part.

CROUCHED in the red sand, handling a stone artefact with an arc of blue desert sky above him, Mike Smith is at home. This connoisseur of deserts, who revolutionised our understanding of the human history of Central Australia, has a discerning eye for the distinctive character of Australia’s Red Centre. His new book, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, published in March by Cambridge University Press, is the most important exploration of Australia’s ancient human history since John Mulvaney’s The Prehistory of Australia was published forty-four years ago.

“The discoverers, explorers and colonists of the three million square miles which are Australia,” Mulvaney wrote in his revolutionary opening sentence, “were its Aborigines.” He was writing at the end of the 1960s, a decade that he called “the deluge,” “the golden years,” “the Dreamtime” of Australian archaeology. Australians had finally confirmed that they lived on a continent with a truly ancient human history and suddenly found themselves gazing into a dizzying abyss of time.

Settler Australia has a history of ambivalence about intimations of Aboriginal antiquity and adaptability. Colonists were reluctant to acknowledge the depth of belonging of a people whose continent they had usurped. This means that any broad understanding of the human antiquity of Australia is a relatively recent and dramatic event that rested on the twin revolutions of professional archaeology and radiocarbon dating, both of which emerged in local practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Since that time, archaeological dates for human occupation in Australia have deepened from 13,000 years before the present (secured by Mulvaney at Kenniff Cave in Queensland in 1962) to over 30,000 years at Lake Mungo by 1970, to over 40,000 years at several sites by the 1980s, and then a likely 50–55,000 years determined by Rhys Jones, Mike Smith and Bert Roberts at Malakunanja II in Arnhem Land in 1989. “No segment of the history of Homo sapiens,” wrote Mulvaney, “had been so escalated since Darwin took time off the Mosaic standard.” It turned out that “the timeless land” was actually replete with time – and dynamic with human history.

Mike Smith’s career unfolded during this period when settler Australia was coming to grips with the deep Aboriginal past – and one of the archaeological revelations of the mid to late 1980s came from his own excavation at Puritjarra in western Central Australia. Smith had arrived in Australia from Blackpool, England, in 1961, aged six, the son of “ten pound” British migrants. For a few months during his primary school years, his father’s work took young Mike to remote Ceduna, the last major settlement before the Nullarbor Plain, with a population that was mainly Greek and Aboriginal. In this town of sand and cinder-block houses, Mike remembers collecting lizards and playing in rusty cars. He began to develop a taste for arid Australia: “the smell of the country, that light, the sense of openness and adventure.” Although he knows Australia as few do, Smith has never lost his British accent and has been known to treat it humorously as a “speech impediment.”

In late primary school he made a conscious decision to pursue a career in archaeology. He had corresponded with staff at the South Australian Museum about his reptiles, and by the age of fifteen he was asking to join a museum dig at Roonka on the Lower Murray and then one led by Hungarian émigré Alexander Gallus at Koonalda Cave in the Nullarbor. Carrying buckets at dig sites enabled him to meet the well-known archaeologist Rhys Jones, “a very inspirational man” who was happy to “talk to a kid.” By the time Mike came to the Australian National University in 1974 to study archaeology with John Mulvaney, he already had substantial field experience and was “hooked on Australian work.” In an interview for the National Library of Australia last year, he recalled the excitement of this period: “There were new discoveries every six months or so. And this combined with my own personal exploration of the continent. I was interested in geography; I was interested in the structure of a continent. And archaeology was my means of travel as much as anything else.”

Soon after finishing a masters degree, he got a job as field archaeologist at the Northern Territory Museum in Darwin where his “amazing brief” was “to engage in the field survey and excavation of Aboriginal and Macassan sites in the Northern Territory.” By the beginning of 1982 he was keen to move his base to Alice Springs, for the Red Centre had got in his blood. Ceduna had played a part in seducing him to aridity, but so too had visits to the South Australian Museum, where he gazed, fascinated, at “those older museum displays of Arrernte ceremonial costumes: the big, conical, feather-down headdresses with the feathers glued on with blood.” They seemed to depict a society that was not just exotic but totally alien, and yet the setting was his own continental backyard, that great alluring heart of desert that was part of the geographical imagination of South Australians. He glimpsed the mysterious world captured in Songs of Central Australia by the anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow, and in the writings of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen. He realised that “there was a rich, exotic Aboriginal cultural and political system out there. Central Australia is where I wanted to be.”

SMITH wanted to test the generally accepted belief that Central Australia had been occupied by people only after the end of the last Ice Age. He needed a site that would make full use of his stratigraphic skills and surgical precision, a site that would be a “palimpsest of different deserts,” of past climates, geomorphic processes and cultural systems. He searched for years. The desk he inherited in Alice Springs had a pile of slips of paper in a drawer, one of which noted the existence of a large cave near Mount Winter in the Cleland Hills. Nothing more than that, but it was a vital clue. “But it took a lot of time to work out quite how to get out there and also where to go,” he recalls. Finally, with the help of historian Dick Kimber and rock art scholar Grahame Walsh, Smith was able to get to the remote Cleland Hills.

It was 3 August 1986 and they had just one morning to search sixteen kilometres of the range for the great hollow of a cave. Kimber walked south and Smith walked north. Mike walked and walked, and finally came round a corner of the outcrop, and then he saw something. “I could see these shadows at the base of an escarpment and it looked like it could be something quite big,” he wrote later. “So I walked over and there was this absolutely huge rock shelter, I mean enormous! A big opera shell structure. I have not seen anything like it since; it is absolutely the most remarkable site. I knew that was the site, it matched the description. It was the site that would warm any archaeologist’s heart. I knew this was a site that would give me a good sequence.”

“A short time later I met Mike,” Dick Kimber recorded. “He was elated. He had found the cave.” Smith had found Puritjarra, the site that would occupy much of his archaeological attention for the next quarter-century.

After Lake Mungo, Puritjarra is the single most important archaeological site in the Australian desert – not simply because of its intrinsic values, but also because of the time invested in its analysis. Thanks to Mike’s enduring comm itment, it is one of the most carefully documented and dated sites in Australia. Puritjarra deepened the chronology of human history in the centre of the continent from 10,000 to 35,000 years, a period at least as long as modern humans have occupied western Europe. Modern Australians began at last to realise that they were the inheritors of a human saga of global significance, a drama in which people survived Ice Age droughts in the central Australian deserts and managed to sustain civilisation in the face of massive climate change. Puritjarra is a place that Australians should revere.

Smith’s new book, which was launched at the National Museum of Australia in March, tells the story of Puritjarra – but also of all Australia’s arid lands. It explains and analyses the social and environmental history of the largest area of desert in the southern hemisphere. In reality, inland Australia is made up of a variety of deserts with great natural diversity – it is a vast region of drylands, dune fields, stony plains, ephemeral rivers, salt lakes and desert uplands, all quite different from the deserts of southern Africa, South America or North Africa. Smith’s book is a product of his life-long commitment to understanding this unique region. He has worked on an outback sheep station as a roustabout, hiked and driven the country as a field archaeologist, walked with a string of camels through remote country west of Lake Mackay and in the Simpson Desert, and dug carefully into desert sands. He sees himself as “holding the region up to the light like a gemstone, turning it around and watching its personality refracted in different ways.” This is a scientific work that is also literature.

There have been many outstanding studies in Australian archaeology in the half century since Mulvaney’s book; in fact, I feel we are blessed, as Australians, to have so many gifted archaeologists to guide us in our quest to understand the deep past of this continent. But Mike Smith’s book is notable for its careful absorption, acknowledgement and encapsulation of all the scholarship that precedes it. Through his synthesis, which is built on the foundation stone of his own original archaeological research, he makes us see Australian human history anew.

Smith was a student of Mulvaney and, like him, is a cultural historian as well as an archaeologist. Both these men see archaeology, with its palaeo-environmental data and its science of stratigraphy, as ultimately a humanities discipline. Although Smith established some of our oldest dates of human occupation, he believes that the best way to demolish the “timeless” metaphor that stalks ancient Australia is to piece together a complex, contoured history of social and environmental change from the first arrival of people in Australia to the present. A nuanced narrative of change through millennia ultimately conveys depth better than dates. In The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, Smith works from the ancient past forwards and from the ethnographic and historical present backwards, and he produces a rich history of Australian humanity.

As well as connecting Australians to the human exodus from Africa, he proposes an Australian history of constant social change such that, for example, “much of the fabric of desert tradition” encountered by Europeans might be no older than 4000 years. It turns out that the classic ethnographies of a “timeless” people actually described desert societies that had survived, and been transformed by, an environmental roller-coaster and were undergoing accelerating cultural change. The deep past is shown to echo powerfully in the contemporary cross-cultural history of people, politics and possession.

In 1996, reflecting on the Australian time revolution, archaeologist Denis Byrne wrote a brilliant essay called “Deep Nation” for the journal Aboriginal History, in which he meditated on what it means for a settler nation to embrace as its own the past of a culture it once rejected as a savage anachronism. Byrne analysed how the discourse of depth – which is such an appropriate and seductive metaphor – has sometimes inadvertently led to archaeology’s disconnection from the living Aboriginal present and to an essentialism of a timeless, traditional Aboriginal past. Byrne argued that, “if archaeology were to cease concerning itself with the nation’s desire for depth, it might rise, as it were, to the surface.” By “surface,” he meant that relatively horizontal (post-1788) terrain “where duration is measured in terms of generations rather than millennia.” Such practice would cease to locate real Aboriginality in the pre-colonial past, and would refuse the obsession with cultural purity. Writing almost two decades ago, Byrne did not foresee, perhaps, how quickly this apparent binary might be transcended, and how effectively the depths and the surface might be united in one remarkable vision.

MIKE Smith’s career and oeuvre help us to think through these challenging and exciting dilemmas of our time. He sees himself as part of the generation of archaeologists who picked up the baton from John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones and completed the basic archaeological exploration of the continent: “in terms of finding the corners of the room, that was a job that my generation finished, completed.” He is also part of the first generation of Australian-trained archaeologists. And he feels privileged to have been among the last to have travelled and worked with Aboriginal people who grew up in the bush without major contact with Europeans. His reflective practice offers us an enabling window onto archaeology in the period of escalating human timescales and resurgent Aboriginal politics.

Known affectionately at the National Museum as Dr Deep Time – a man so enamoured of stratigraphy that he got a gravedigger’s certificate through TAFE to learn the ins and outs of timber shoring – Mike has also sifted the surface sands of his beloved deserts with meticulous historical care. In an earlier book, Peopling the Cleland Hills (2005), he gives us a remarkable modern history of a frontier, drawn from documents, memories and conversations-in-place. And he finishes The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts with a cultural history of the last millennium. He believes it is important to retain a feeling for the contemporary cultural landscape that swirls around the sites he studies, and so in Peopling the Cleland Hills he uses Puritjarra as a place from which to view the modern social exchange and disruption generated across Kukatja country by the European invasion. Although his focus in that book is the last century-and-a-half, there are tens of thousands of years of history implied in his gaze. Rather than following large-scale events themselves, pursuing them off-stage, as it were, Smith keeps us grounded in place and we see them flicker past or we feel the ripple of their distant impact. There is a kind of Aboriginal patience in this earthed archaeological view – in this Ice Age inheritance, this steady, embedded watchfulness over particular country. We can sense in that book, more explicitly than in any of Smith’s other work, how intimately and even spiritually he has come to identify with the desert and its modern people. This is surely a source of the powerful poetic vision that illuminates his science.

The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts fits within a grand tradition of Australian desert literature of which Mike Smith is keenly conscious: Ernest Giles, Baldwin Spencer, Frank Gillen, J.W. Gregory, C.T. Madigan, T.G.H. Strehlow, H.H. Finlayson and Francis Ratcliffe, to name a few. A lineage of desert authors and titles is invoked in this study and every issue is elucidated through an intellectual history of its origins and evolution. You only have to talk with Mike Smith for a few minutes to know his magic with words, phrases and metaphors. It is no surprise that his book glows with poetry – I mean the poetics of hard-won hard facts beautifully presented, the poetics of disciplinary insight and logic, and the poetics of lucid prose.

Recently Smith donated his “Desert Collection” of books to the library of the National Museum of Australia. There they are shelved separately in a beautiful room. And Smith’s book now slips into the left-hand end of the top shelf. It is there at the very apex of a spine of ideas and words, a sweet acknowledgement of the donor. But the book is also, symbolically, the sum of that collection, for it is a culmination of it, a distillation of all that has gone before – and more.

Smith has written The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts for several audiences: for the world archaeological community, for his fellow Australians, and especially for the people who welcome him in their desert country. He has worked with three generations of the Multa and Tjukadai families responsible for the Cleland Hills. In his 2012 National Library interview, Mike had this to say to his Aboriginal friends: “This is a rich history. It is something that sits next to the Dreaming. It doesn’t displace it, it doesn’t replace it, but it’s a rich history here, it’s something to be proud of… It’s been my privilege to work on this history, but in a sense it has also been my gift.”

The American archaeologist Richard Gould, whose important work at the Puntutjarpa rock shelter in the Western Desert in the late 1960s is described in Smith’s book, is quoted on the back cover of The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, declaring it “a ‘must’ for anyone seriously interested in Australian cultural history.” He’s right. And note that Gould does not use the words “archaeology” or “prehistory” or “Aboriginal.” I think there is a kind of coming of age of a settler nation in being able to say that this is, quite simply, a landmark work in Australian cultural history.

Mike Smith begins and ends the book with the Arrernte ceremonies performed for Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in the summer of 1896, those “exotic” rituals which first fascinated him as a boy visiting the South Australian Museum. He calls the ceremonies “a watershed event in anthropological literature, a profound intellectual exchange between elite members of two very different societies.” He explains at the end of the book that he has tried to approach the 1896 ceremony from the other side, “reconstructing the long history that shaped the world of the Arrernte elders sitting across the ceremonial ground” from the observing Europeans. This is the other side of the frontier in a whole new sense. In 1981, Henry Reynolds wrote a revelatory book about the often-violent encounter between Aborigines and settlers on Australia’s grasslands, and he used that metaphor as his title. Here the archaeologist Mike Smith, with rigorous science and inspired humanism, imagines the other side of the frontier not just in space, but in deep time too. •

Tom Griffiths is the W.K. Hancock Professor of History at the Australian National University.

FOR Malaysia, the late 1950s were a time of national upheaval and individual decision-making. In 1957, the Malayan Federation achieved its independence from Britain, replete with a newly drafted constitution and a model of citizenship shaped by an elite group of British-educated Malay Muslims. Soon afterwards, a recently married Balbir Kaur arrived in Malaya from India to begin a new life. Her sister-in-law and her husband were in the process of returning from Malaya to independent India, and they left their six-year-old son, my father, in her care.

When Balbir Kaur arrived in Malaya, the country’s ethnic groups – Malays, Chinese, Indians and “Others” – were already said to be living racially bounded lives. The educated Malay elite was part of a broader Malay nationalist group, the United Malays National Organisation, or UMNO, which had emerged from the struggle over competing visions of a postcolonial Malaya in the heady days of the 1940s. One option, Britain’s Malayan Union proposal, saw Malaya as a nation-state in which citizens would have the same status, regardless of their racial origin. But this proposal was abandoned the late 1940s as UMNO rose above the various organisations jockeying for leadership of the national struggle. All pro-independence groupings to the left of UMNO were banned, and the colonial authorities had set about eradicating the Malayan Communist Party, whose politics were Malay nationalism’s strongest competitor.

At independence, being Malay was invested with a particular political charge. The new nation came into the world fused with UMNO’s political dominance, and race and religion were symbolically elevated as the defining categories by which its affairs would be organised. Malays were constitutionally defined as Muslim, and Islam was named the religion of the Malayan Federation. From the first, UMNO was able to claim it had delivered Malaya (which would become Malaysia in 1963) to its citizens, and particularly to its Malay citizens.

That political charge has never gone away. Nor has the belief that each “race” has quite different, competing aspirations that could tear Malaysia apart if they are not balanced against each other with careful precision. This balance, UMNO has always argued, can only be maintained through a racial partnership that assures the majority Malay Muslims that their special position is secure. To the minorities, on the other hand, UMNO offers security and protection from Malays and Islam.

The racial harmony produced by this partnership was one of the guarantees UMNO made to the British in return for independence. It was expressed politically in the coalition UMNO formed with the Malayan Chinese Association and the Malayan Indian Congress soon after independence. Known as the Alliance, and later renamed the National Front, it campaigns every five years under a blue banner with a white scale at its centre, symbolising the racial balance it claims only it can deliver. The symbolism has shaped Malaysian electoral politics, and every other facet of public life, since independence. Assisted by the racial voting patterns it helped fuse with the nation it shaped, the National Front has governed Malaysia ever since.

YET elections in Malaysia are no longer as they used to be. Just as the campaign for this weekend’s national election kicked off in April, Balbir Kaur died in her sleep. Family members from Malaysia and overseas rushed to Kuala Lumpur to organise a funeral during the most fiercely contested election in a generation. Their efforts to arrange her final rites intersected with a new style of campaigning.

The family’s preferred temple, the Gurdwara Sahib Petaling Jaya, was already booked for annual Vaisakhi celebrations. As it turned out, the temple would host not only the usual crowd of Punjabi Sikhs that weekend, but a special guest as well, none other than prime minister Najib Razak.

The prime minister has been visiting Sikh temples at Vaisakhi since 2008, when the National Front was re-elected with its majority reduced to below the threshold that allows it to unilaterally amend the nation’s constitution. By opening a small space between the nation and its National Front, that election loosened the government’s capacity to conflate itself with the nation. One aspect of the public mood that produced this result was the collapse of non-Malay support for “their” component organisations of the National Front, the Malayan Chinese Association and the Malayan Indian Congress.

It seemed as if framing political action in racial and religious terms had proved unsuccessful for the nation’s minorities, and they were voting accordingly. Among the Indian population, for example, Sikh organisations had been making unsuccessful requests for funds for religious facilities and initiatives, and for Punjabi-language education. Their fortunes changed after 2008: every year since then, the prime minister has arrived at Sikh temples during Vaisakhi bearing gifts. This year, Najib Razak promised RM3.8 million (A$1.2 million) in funding to projects related to Sikh and Punjabi community life.

Najib’s presence at the temple, and the cheque he promised, illustrated the National Front’s predicament. Racial voting patterns have broken down so much that it can no longer count on any community acting as its voting “safe deposit.” Every group appears split between the National Front and its competitor, the People’s Alliance, a coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar was once an UMNO member and Malaysia’s finance minister, and was famously sacked and jailed for sodomy in 1998. Yet the National Front is committed, to its political core, to campaigning to “races,” and so every small community must now be treated as a target group. Najib had to come to visit Punjabi Sikhs, who comprise less than 5 per cent of Malaysia’s voting population, to ask them to vote for him.

He couldn’t have stated his request in plainer terms: “I hope the next Vaisakhi you continue to invite me. I also hope to attend the next Vaisakhi in my present job.” He has also promised that “small communities like the Sikhs will enjoy greater benefits from the government” and “together, we will deliver results that directly improve the quality of life of Malaysian Indians.” Vaisakhi offered Najib a campaign opportunity, and Balbir Kaur’s prayers were delayed by nearly a week.

BUT in what sense could Malaysia’s racial foundations be said to be collapsing? And could such a collapse topple the National Front without destroying the nation along with it?

Malaysia’s racial boundaries have never been entirely stable. They survive through frequent reassertion, through statements and actions constantly broadcast to the nation by its leaders, and through successively stronger institutional measures taken by the state and the machinery of government. Yet it was one such institution, the Registrar of Societies, which recently revealed, entirely unwittingly, how artificial these boundaries are in practice.

On 18 April, as Balbir Kaur’s prayers finally began, the Registrar made a decision to rule on a matter it had previously decided to postpone until after the election. This was the dispute over the flawed internal election for the central executive committee of the Democratic Action Party, or DAP, one of the three parties in the People’s Alliance. Two days before candidate nominations closed, the Registrar ruled that it no longer recognised the committee. The potentially serious implication was that the de-recognised committee’s authorisation for candidates to nominate under the DAP banner was technically invalid. It opened up the possibility that the party name and symbol – a blue and red rocket against a white background – could not be used during the election campaign, potentially rendering the party’s candidates unrecognisable among voters. Rumours circulated via phone and social media: would the party be deregistered and its bank accounts frozen? If the Alliance won the election, could every DAP candidate be disqualified on a technicality? Could the election, and with it the nation, be taken back by the National Front?

To guard against this possibility, the DAP leadership made the unexpected announcement that its candidates in Peninsular Malaysia would campaign under the name and banner of the Islamist party running as part of the Alliance coalition. The Parti Islam SeMalaysia, or PAS, has commonly been seen as an entirely unacceptable option for non-Malays and non-Muslims, particularly because of its history of campaigning for laws based on hudud, a class of punishments in sharia for crimes considered to contravene the rights of God. If hudud were implemented, legal provisions could be introduced to remove the hands of thieves convicted of stealing, for example. Even without hudud,  PAS has been portrayed as the nasty end of the Islamisation of public life taking place in Malaysia since the late 1980s. Indeed, previous iterations of the Alliance coalition have collapsed due to tensions between PAS and the DAP, a liberal and secularist social democratic party.

In its latest incarnation, however, the Alliance has held government in four Malaysian states for five years now. Although they have had their share of problems, none of these governments has presided over inter-racial or inter-religious chaos. This time, with that track record, PAS and the DAP seized on the Registar’s decision as an opportunity to demonstrate their unity and cross-racial appeal. The media has since reported election rallies and gatherings in which Chinese voters have carried PAS flags and Malay Muslims have festooned themselves in DAP flags. When there was no public outpouring of disgust at these cross-racial and cross-religious acts, the National Front’s warnings of racial chaos risked being exposed as entirely unfounded.

The PAS banner is a white full moon against a green background. The DAP’s decision to run its candidates under the PAS name and banner was quickly celebrated by PAS spiritual leader Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat. Skilled at the witty and colloquial quip, Nik Aziz stated, “In navigating the ship of national politics, PAS and the DAP have frequently been played against each other by UMNO and the National Front.” He added that “the barrier of suspicion has collapsed completely” and “the rocket has successfully landed on the moon.” The possibility of pan-racial and pan-religious politics emerging in Malaysia suddenly became visible for those who were watching closely.

THIS pan-racial moment also made visible the question of what kind of nation Malaysia should be. As the period of national decision-making in the 1940s and 1950s demonstrated, there have been other possible Malaysias, organised according to principles other than race and religion. Could the nation’s boundaries collapse or be crossed as a result of stray moments of possibility like that produced by the Registar of Societies’ decision? And could the possibility of an Alliance victory on Sunday be signalling a new opportunity for a pan-racial Malaysia? Will the nation’s citizens be prepared to live as post-racial Malaysians, or does the prospect truly loom as a threat too great to surmount?

No matter what the result tomorrow, that particular moment of pan-racial possibility is now over. By 20 April, nomination day, the Election Commission had ruled that DAP candidates, despite the Registar’s decision, would be permitted to run under the party name and its rocket banner. The DAP decided it would return to the rocket rather than stay on the moon.

Perhaps it was important that the possibility of the moment be revealed, and then hidden again from plain view. The situation is more stable now, and Malaysia’s racial and religious boundaries remain, although the Alliance is campaigning on an equal opportunity platform. By foreclosing the possibility for now, however, the Alliance has elected to avoid attacking race politics too stridently, presumably on the basis that it is better to win the election first. With the result too close to call, perhaps the Alliance must avoid risking a surge of voter revulsion caused by too much boundary crossing too soon. •

Amrita Malhi is a Research Fellow in the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia.