Edition 18
In the Neighbourhood
- Published 4th December, 2007
- ISBN: 9780733321276
- Extent: 280 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
But public debate and understanding of what this may mean, has not kept pace. The rapid changes in the region will shape the Pacific Century. This demands tough new thinking. Location provides both opportunities and challenges.
Michael Wesley argues in a provocative essay that history has not ended, but the future will be shaped by a resurgence of the world’s oldest civilisations.
Australian engagement is crucial. This goes beyond business and security to questions of identity, belonging and culture.
When Kevin Rudd spoke in Mandarin at the APEC forum, he suggested Australia could play a new and important role in regional geo politics, on its own terms.
In the Neighbourhood presents a rich tapestry of the diversity of the region – a mosaic of cultural and social interaction that touches the heart. Writers with deep knowledge take us on an exotic and pragmatic journey and provide signposts to the future.
In this Edition
Sharing values
WE ARE IN an era in which the governments or cultural authorities (elected or self-appointed) are engaged in defining or articulating cultural boundaries. This search for national selfhood may be relatively benign, but attempts to codify and delimit the national essence of a territory,...
Japan’s paradoxical neighbourhoods
JAPANESE PEOPLE ARE very aware of their densely layered past and how much of it informs the present, so despite the extravagance, complexity, super-modernity and rampant kitsch of the urban terrain, which infects the way we ‘see' Japan, older models may be more potent....
Remembering a forgotten survivor
MOST WAR MEMORIALS are made from stone. This one is made from paper: ten original sketches drawn in ink, pen and coloured pencil and stuck in a velvety leather autograph album with cornflour-and-water glue, three Christmas cards, four letters and nine black-and-white photographs the...
A case for literary contamination
What I am now is an interesting deformity. I am not Asian and never will be. Even if I forget it sometimes, no one else does. But I am not what I was before I came here, either. Something in me has changed, or...
In the eye of the beholder
I WOULD NOT call Pasay a slum. Calling or not calling Pasay City a slum would assume the ability to make a clear distinction between an overcrowded neighbourhood and a crowded one, between unacceptable housing and acceptable housing. I cannot make that distinction but...
A lasting sorrow
AUSTRALIANS ARE EAGER to learn ever more about the Australian side of the Gallipoli conflict, but not the Turkish experience. Similarly, there is growing interest in Australia's participation in the Vietnam War but little attempt to understand what it meant to the Vietnamese. This...
Back to the avantgarde
EVERY PICTURE TELLS a story. Sometimes what happens around a picture can be as telling as the picture itself. Without having to change in any way, the picture finds itself in such interesting times that its meaning and value alter. That is what happened...
Book without bonking
XIEZI (WEDGE) 001:[i] On the night of July 16, 2007, I received an email in Chinese from River, a poetry magazine editor in China, in response to my query about a submission. This one sentence is worthy of English translation in its entirety: '(you)...
Location, location, location
I WAS MORE tired than I'd ever been when the fleet of black Volkswagens arrived. We watched them pull into the hotel forecourt from our table in the lobby cafe. All the other tables were empty and set for the morning; even in Beijing...
Under the aura of Saturn
ON DECEMBER 31, 1926, from her lodgings on the outskirts of Paris, the exiled Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, wrote a final letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, who had died three days earlier. Her letter began like this: 'Is this year to end with your...
Eight Chinese lessons
CHINESE LESSON 1: I was nine and it was dinner time. My father was in monologue mode. He said that at the north bank of the west end of Qutang Gorge on the Yangtze River, there were many caves in the cliffs. During the...
(See) Beijing youth daily
AT NIGHT, WHEN the sun finally, reluctantly, sets in the stifling Beijing summer, the view from the apartment window takes on another form; layered silhouettes of tall buildings frame a sign that glows rich and red in the velvety poison of the polluted night...
Capitals of the world
For BruceTHIS IS A story about a poor boy in Kathmandu. It is also about his friend and mine, a man so differently placed from that boy that comprehension is difficult. It is a history, too, of a long, collaborative association and friendship founded...
On the economy of thongs
I CANNOT ENVISAGE a more conducive way of grasping the essence of globalisation and the post-colonial than to sit with Robert and Headley on the earthen floor of a hut in a village in Vanuatu, in quiet conversation about the vicissitudes of life.I've never...
Hong Kong 1967: Summer of discontent
PERHAPS I SHOULD have seen a portent in the entrails, but I could divine only horror from the scene. We'd come home from a pleasant Chinese New Year lunch to find our backyard had become a charnel house. The chickens which had arrived that...
A routine removal
IT IS A cold winter evening and the visitors' lounge at the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre feels like the waiting room of a forlorn hospital, a place where you sit anticipating news that can only be bad. A few children's drawings are sticky-taped to...
A night at the fights
MY TAXI WOUND through the early evening traffic, moving like a snake through tall grass. Packed buses towered over us, lurching, belching out blue-black smoke. Lithe, colourful tuk-tuks, weighted down with passengers and goods, darted in and out, taking advantage of their size and...
Lotus blossom dog tags
GEORGE W BUSH Snr berates Iran for newk-ya-lah ambitions. George Bush enunciated the Saddam in Hussein like he'd just lipped too much salt with his margarita. Richard Nixon pronounced Viet-Nahm like a tropical wasting disease, rhymed with harm.Three decades after the fall of Saigon, for some the background chatter...
Fear, hope and three days in Dili
WHEN THE TINY Airnorth plane landed at Dili airport I knew something about campaigning but little about Timorese politics. Like even the most casual Australian observer, I recognise our neighbourhood is a vastly diverse one. A comfortable friend to the south-east; an arc of...
The city lost to heaven
I WRITE TONIOGHT in a hotel room supplied by two congenial governments, having sent away the evening's inevitable prostitute. My window looks across an ocean of stray light. Chaotic currents updrift into the satellite maps I know of Beijing, where the light hovers above...
Gulag
Selected for Best Australian Stories 2007IN THE MORNING we woke and it was like all the mornings we'd imagined. The sun brushed the edges of the heavy, dark drapes of your bedroom and the air held us softly on the bed. I looked at...
In pursuit of faith
Catching communistsI REMEMBER VERY very well the words the president used. We were all summoned to a big hall. It's always like that with big people, generals, presidents and the like; the longer you wait around picking blackheads and scratching your arse, the more...
Lost in transit
IT'S ELEVEN O'CLOCK in the morning but the tunnels below Seoul Town Hall are deserted; window grilles closed over dusty lace tablecloths and bags and shoes. I stop at a bank of beaten up phones and call the Japanese Embassy. No answer. New Year's...
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