Edition 31
Ways of Seeing
- Published 1st March, 2011
- ISBN: 9781921656996
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Now more than ever, we need a human-centred approach to the big dilemmas of the day, learning from literature and philosophy and drawing on the creative imagination.
Philosopher and author John Armstrong argues that the value of humanities is measured by their worth and relevance outside the academy.
Award-winning historian Peter Cochrane reveals the importance of historical imagination; Tanveer Ahmed explores neuroscience and policy; Leah Kaminsky reconnects the physician with the narrative.
This edition also contains essays, memoir and fiction by Ian Lowe, Robyn Williams, Robert Hillman, Amanda Lohrey and Julienne van Loon, plus much more.
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In this Edition
The play of days
I AM SITTING in the autumn shade at the edge of our long driveway. We always stop here on the way back from one of our walks because my son, ten months old, likes to play with the pebbles. We live in the midst...
White me
IN THE COURSE of an average Australian lifetime, a white lifetime, face-to-face communication with Indigenous Australians might be fairly limited. In my own case, five fairly talkative decades have yielded only three brief conversations. The first was with a sister and brother, Esther and...
Exploring the historical imagination
IT HAS BEEN said of George Macaulay Trevelyan that he was gifted with a 'vivid pictorial sense'. True enough, but consider for instance an extract from the opening to his biography of Earl Grey, Grey of Fallodon (1937):Fallodon has no rare and particular beauty....
The minor fall, the major lift
ENGAGEMENT WITH THE fundamentals of music and sound deeply influence the formation of a composer's aesthetic. There is such a thing as musical logic, which is based on a mix of physical factors around sound, psychoacoustics and cognition, and complex culturally specific factors that...
What is seen and heard
‘What are these blinks of an eyelid, against whichthe only defence is an eternal an inhuman wakefulness?Might not they be the cracks and chinks through whichanother voice, other voices, speak in our lives?By what right do we close our ears to them?’– JM Coetzee, Foe (1986) NEARLY...
Word for word
'Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent; for they introduce words by the eye, not by the ear.' – Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, c. 600 WHEN I TELL people I...
We, the populists
IN OCTOBER 2010 Australia's Director of Military Prosecutions, Brigadier Lyn McDade, brought charges against three Australian soldiers, resulting from an incident in which six people were killed – one Taliban insurgent, but also four children and a teenager.Australia's most famous talk radio presenter, Alan...
Selling the forests to save the trees
LONDON EXCEL, SITUATED in the now gentrified old docklands of the British capital, is a huge empty space designed for the meeting convenience of the global insider class. Inside the conference centre the street is kept distant as delegates, dwarfed by outsized internal walkways,...
More than human, more than nature
PERFECT SEPTEMBER DUSK. Tide low, water still. We scrunch wet sand beneath our shoes, facing the rocky cliff opposite. A hooded human in a light-coloured coat enters left, across the water. The figure slowly walks, stretches, crawls, lies, curls – crossing our field of...
The crumbling wall
I GREW UP in an era when science had an aura of certainty and solidity: it was 'the true exemplar of authentic knowledge', as the eminent sociologist Robert K Merton put it. History inevitably contains a subjective element, and there are different and legitimate...
Reformation and renaissance
ONE EVENING I was getting into the crowded lift at my local tube station in Central London, to go down to the train. As the doors closed a middle-aged gentleman squeezed in. I recognised him as a fairly distinguished professor of history from the...
Death and distraction
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2011HER SUBJECT IS distraction. She's written a book about it, published by one of those intimidating American academic houses. She's American and has that attractive twangy accent I can never place. South coast? Boston? With her, though, it's...
Rebuilding the Stratocaster
'In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.' – Charles Mingus I FOUND MYSELF collecting guitars. It was an imperceptible transition. Two decades ago I'd owned just a couple of...
Tunnel vision of the soul
IN MIDWINTER JULIA shuffled into my office and slowly lowered herself into the chair beside my desk. It was a cold, wet Melbourne morning and patients were starting to pile into the clinic, sheltering from the wind. The clock on the wall showed fifteen...
Language wars
WHEN MY SON told me he was going to Beijing to study Mandarin after graduating, he also said, with a mischievous grin, 'See? I'm a good Chinese son after all. Are you happy now?'It was far from an admission of defeat in the battle...
Science without a capital S
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2011SCIENCE IS ONE of the few human constructs designed to test its own veracity continuously. There is no point in time at which we all nod, wise men with beards, women with six-figure IQs, and say: 'That's settled...next!'...
The bone garden
AN OLD MAN is sitting by his fireside, candlelight illuminating a halo of wisps around his bald head. He puts aside his Guardian Weekly and stares into the fire, toothless jaws working rhythmically. His pre-dinner ration, self-imposed, is five pieces of chocolate.Why five pieces,...
The raft
IF ASKED THEN why I had not returned to London I could have – would have – given several clear reasons that, looking back, I recognised as mere rationalisations; transient structures of thought that clear a space for some deeper instinct or intuition to...
From what I hear
BUT WHAT IF the cops see us?But what if you run out of money?But what if you miss your bus?But what if it rains and you don't have a jacket?But what if your house burns down while you're out?But what if you trip over...
Monkey business
– Don't look them in the eye, she said. They find it confronting. With your build you scream dominant male.She was flattering me, as women often do. I tried to look at everything else, at the unpickable locks on the cages, at the newly...
I want to be editor of the chimpanzee register
You know, chimps?They sure as Christ know youThat genus with answersThey've scoped you for yearsYes, you. For millenniaChimps with hammersChimps with bonesTwirling them like batonsIn the marching bandThat is your DNAI want to be editor of the chimpanzee registerTagged in XMLPencilling in codeOf who's...
The drought breaks, July 2010
Again clouds balloon across the sky,Restoration ladies lifting swelled skirtsto piss in casual passingon the mud-running gutter of creeks.Daisies dash across the plainand dribble along the fence,songlines from paddock to paddock,white-capped and yellow-eyedthey dance through saltbushwith the fecund smile of spring.A growth of moss...
Featured Contributors
Peter Cochrane
Peter Cochrane is an honorary associate in the Department of History, University of Sydney. His most recent book is...
Leah Kaminsky
Leah Kaminsky is a physician and award-winning writer. Her latest novel, The Hollow Bones (Vintage Australia, 2019), won the...
Julienne van Loon
Julienne van Loon is an associate professor in creative writing at RMIT University. Her books include Road Story (Allen...
Robyn Williams
Robyn Williams has presented The Science Show on ABC Radio National since 1975. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Honours)...
