The first thing I did after finishing Anna Funder’s debut novel All That I Am was to order a copy of Ernst Toller’s autobiography I Was a German. Toller features as a ‘character’ in Funder’s much anticipated book. We meet him holed up in a New York hotel in 1939, increasingly despairing of shaking the United States out of its apathy about the Nazi threat. Having failed as a script writer he spends his days dictating a new version of his autobiography to his secretary, a version that will include the interior, emotional detail missing from the first. No emotional ingredient is more important than Dora Fabian – activist, feminist and the brave soul who smuggled Toller’s manuscript out of Germany. In Funder’s version of events Dora is the great love of Toller’s life.

I was curious to know if this revised autobiography actually existed or if it was one of the narrative devices employed by Funder in the service of her story. It’s the sort of curiosity Funder’s publishers have pre-empted by emblazoning the words ‘A Novel’ on the cover of the book. This is a work of fiction, the cover declares. The story contained herein is a product of the author’s imagination and no correspondence will be entered into. But the declaration is undercut by the use of real names (Toller, Fabian, Bertold Jacob, Hans Wesseman) and the tantalising appendix on sources, in which Funder says

When Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933 my friend Ruth and her friends fled into exile. From there, they tried to bring him down. This is their story, or what I have made of it. It is reconstructed from fossil fragments, much as you might draw skin and feathers over an assembly of dinosaur bones, to fully see the beast’.

This is an open invitation for anthropological inquiry into the beast that Funder has created. Curiosity about which parts of the story were ‘bones’, and which, ‘feathers’, distracted me from the compelling, rich narrative.

As is to be expected from the author of Stasiland, the brilliant account of how the German Democratic Republic’s secret police colonised the lives of its citizens, Funder evokes the Weimar era with a tactile, even claustrophobic, clarity. Berlin has all the heady decadence one expects, complete with an evening in a night club where naked statues provide the entertainment and the patrons snort cocaine. When the characters at the centre of the novel are forced into exile by the rising Nazi machine, their dislocation in a London that doesn’t really want them (or at least doesn’t want their warnings of what is coming) is palpable. In their former lives, they were movers and shakers in the cultural and political life of Germany. In London, they must battle anonymity, language barriers and the baffling social subtleties of the English upper class. They must also be seen to honour the condition of their visas – no political activity – or face deportation back to Germany. It is a test that some will face with jaw-dropping moral courage. And some will catastrophically fail.

This is an important story. I – English born and a historian by training – knew very little about how actively the Gestapo harassed and brutalised political refugees in London. I knew a little about Dora Fabian but not enough to place her alongside resistance heroines like Sophie Scholl or Helene Moszkiewiez. There are moments in this book where readers must stare down uncomfortable contemporary parallels, such as when the St Louis is refused entry to the USA and ultimately returns its boatload of Jews to Germany. More than 250 of the ship’s passengers died in the holocaust.

The hybrid of fiction and history is not without its pleasures. For those of us with unfashionably modernist compulsions to sort the ‘real’ from the ‘fictional’ sleuthing has its rewards. It’s a pleasure Funder well understands, as she recently told me: ‘I think that detectives and novelists have overlapping areas of psychological concern – both are interested in accounting for human behaviours from the evidence we see of them.’ But the form also creates a tension that a work of straight-up fiction avoids. Just as it takes time for gruesome events to comfortably form the butt of jokes, does it take time for historical events to be treated with the licence and informality of invention? We are dealing here with living memory. Indeed, one of the characters (Ruth Becker) is based on Funder’s friend Ruth Blatt, whose extraordinary trajectory brought her to Melbourne via a German prison and exile in Shanghai.

But in Funder’s novel Ruth is not transplanted to Melbourne, but to Sydney. And she appears on the page not as Ruth Blatt – her real name – but as Ruth Becker; perhaps Funder’s nod to the liberties she has taken in imagining her life. By Funder’s own account, Ruth never spoke about her relationship with either Toller or Fabian in Funder’s presence. Fabian and Blatt were not cousins – as the novel has it – but friends. These re-workings of historical fact into imagined fiction make sense when the work is approached as a novel – that is, a form with certain conventions. So, the shift from ‘real’ Melbourne to ‘imagined’ Sydney creates a contrast between the diamantine beauty of the harbour and the grey, dour London of the preceding chapters: precisely the light-and-shade contrast that fiction works with. Making Ruth and Dora cousins is a useful shorthand for their bond and sometimes conflicted loyalty.

Wise and considered readers and critics I know are recording these ‘shorthands’ as factual on their blogs and in their articles. When I asked Funder what she made of this tendency she said that ‘there are boundless inaccuracies out there. I provided notes in the novel both to honour sources, and to enable people to go and find out what is on the historical record if they are interested’. The credentials Funder established with Stasiland perhaps account for a good part of the expectation that Funder has stuck close to the historical record in all things. Funder told me that in All That I Am ‘I made up the plot. I made up the characters’ interior lives, interactions, gestures, relationships, involvements … That said, everything that happens in it might have happened, there is nothing important in a plot sense in it that is contradicted by the historical record as I came across it.’

Funder resolved the history/fiction tensions in Stasiland by explicitly writing herself into the non-fiction narrative. She situated herself as a sympathetic, inquiring and insightful historical observer of the German Democratic Republic. In All that I am Funder is absent. She does not tell us when she is speculating, embellishing or outright inventing. We are left to ferret this out for ourselves – a process that has its joys, but can prove mightily distracting when one wants to get lost in such a fascinating story.

S.A. Jones holds a PhD in history from the University of Western Australia. She is the author of the novel Red Dress Walking and numerous essays.

The talent pool at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is clearly impressive – a student editorial committee has chosen from more than 300 submissions to deliver a tight and scorchingly successful collection of just 35 short stories, poems, and script-writing and non-fiction pieces. No doubt the final decision was excruciating, but apart from just two contrived stories, the offering is highly thought provoking and a teaser of great things to come from the writers represented here.

Managing editor of the New Yorker, Amelia Lester, kicks off the anthology with a concise foreword that wraps up the collection’s overarching themes in a neat bundle and hands them over to the reader: ‘lives are created through a series of choices. Stories are too, and the writers here have made daring and fascinating ones.’

And that is exactly the commonality of all these stories. Despite their myriad differences in tone, subject matter and style, they all deal with the consequences of the choices we make and the way we react to circumstances that are thrust upon us. ‘With a Little Help from Your Friends’ by Benjamin Freeman addresses a teenager’s response to his best friend’s heart-wrenching discovery that he is seriously ill, while the protagonist in Angus Benson’s ‘Down South’ has to come to grips with his own decision to move into adulthood and break away from his childhood friends.

The book is divided into two sections entitled ‘The Life you Chose’ and ‘And That Chose You’. The section title are self-explanatory, but some works encourage us to think more deeply about why the editors have chosen to include it in one section over the other. Sharon Kent’s ‘Jumping for Chicken’, where a 53-year-old crocodile hunter runs away from the responsibility of raising a child is placed in the latter section; while the reader may disagree with his decision, his profession has a strong pull on him that he’s helpless to fight.

A tinge of desperation and sadness hangs over a number of the tales. Many characters regret the decisions they have made. In ‘Odds’ by Rosie Cintio, Chelsea Hammond is left abandoned by the married man she had an affair with, while Louisa in Mathilde de Hautecloque’s ‘Close’ is trapped in the suburbs with just her four year old to keep her company during the day. She begins watching her neighbour, hoping he’ll reach out to her for company.

‘Close’s’ subject matter is achingly familiar. The language is exquisite in this portrait of highly identifiable domesticity: ‘I dragged one of Lenny’s singlets from the basket, flecked by torn tissue, shook it fiercely until drifts of paper snow fell on what was left of the lawn.’ De Hautecloque is skilled at tapping into the melancholy and the allure of the everyday.

The poetry too is flawless in its examination of common fears and insecurities. Georgia Symons hefts us back into adolescence with ‘Mollycoddled’. With her wonderful and sparse use of teenage vernacular she conjures up a party, barges into the minds of the attendees and shakes out all their hopes and anxieties. Anna Nordstroem’s description of blood in ‘On Tuesday Morning’ invokes the black dread of a doctor’s visit:

In the vial it’s almost black,
red
like lipstick on beautiful women
in black and white photographs,
darker
than my mother’s eyelashes
than the red wine in my glass
than my hair at fifteen
than the back of my eyelids
when I fainted this morning.

The poem’s sparseness is its strength – Nordstroem’s use of language tells us reams about her character, who is slightly detached, yet bordering on the hysterical.

The anthology does contain a couple of misses. ‘The Anniversary’ by Deborah Fitzgerald, about the fresh and raw pain of death, contains an unrealistic twist and the writing is laborious. ‘Bend in the River’ by Roslyn McFarland is about a playwright who confessed to a murder he didn’t commit. McFarland succeeds at making her protagonist unlikeable and self-indulgent but the other characters, especially the two policemen, are clichéd.

But on the whole, the ability of the various writers to access the routines, sufferings and hilarity of ordinary life is what makes this collection so successful. The anthology runs the whole gamut of emotions, from the darkly comic (‘Things That Remind Me Of You’ by Rebecca Slater tells how a woman disposes of her ex-boyfriend’s dead cat), to the sad and confronting (racial hatred in Annabel Stafford’s ‘The Mob Can’t Hurt You’). Each story challenges us to think about the inner worlds of others, and some of the best ones cause an imagination explosion, such are their evocative endings. Discrimination, illness, death, break-ups, success and popularity – the authors dissect the trials and tribulations of the everyday with aplomb.

The prose is skilfully rendered, the poetry original and evocative, and the non-fiction fascinating. The collection is a fantastic snapshot of the talent on offer at UTS.

Amy Roil is a book fiend who loves to write. Check out her blog here: www.bookwitch1.blogspot.com.

For a man who is known principally as a visual artist, Donald Friend’s written work has received extraordinary praise. In the foreword to Text’s 2010 edition of Friend’s diaries, Barry Humphries brands the work ‘among the most evocative and amusing writings in all of Australian literature’. And Robert Hughes – who as we know is nothing if not critical – has gone so far as to say ‘there is nothing in Australian letters to equal his diaries’. The fact that both Humphries and Hughes were friends of Friend may be taken as background to this eulogising – but it is also an indication of what lies within. Friend, it seems, was friends with just about everyone.

Much of the material in this collection – and a great deal more – has been previously published in four magnificent volumes by the National Library of Australia. It has been entrusted to Ian Britain –  former editor of Meanjin – who has shaped this wealth of writing, as well as some previously unseen material, into a single volume. Text no doubt hopes this ‘popular edition’ will bring Friend’s diaries to a wider audience. Given the quality of the collection, it is likely to generate renewed interest in the longer versions as well.

The diaries cover, almost continuously, a period from 1929, when a 13-year-old Friend received his first diary for Christmas, until his death sixty years later in 1989. In between the artist goes hoboing in Queensland, lives in the Torres Strait Islands, moves to London, becomes advisor to a Nigerian king, spends time as an official war artist, lives with Russell Drysdale, lives in Italy with Jeffrey Smart, moves to Sri Lanka, moves to Bali, becomes famous, goes broke and befriends Mick Jagger – just to reel off a few highlights. In terms of raw material, Friend’s life offers more in the way of subject matter than any writer should reasonably be able to glean from a single life. As a chronicle of the middle part of the twentieth century, and in particular the Australian art scene, it is remarkably rich. But it is in their style, grace and wit, as much as their substance, that Friend’s diaries really stand out.

Friend was a natural writer. Even as a teenager, his voice was clear as water. Indeed, it is these early diaries, driven by boyish enthusiasm and vast self-belief, punctuated by periods of angst and darkness, that make for the volume’s most compelling reading. Take this tragically cynical insight from a 15-year-old Friend:

I realize now, quite fully, that no one but myself sees in my pictures that which is but a glimpse of my ideal. They applaud the pictures that I have disliked. Still, I have my own ideal and, as I shall rely on the artistic public, why not paint pictures that shall please their ideal? Even though it soils the pure light of my own particular line of beauty, which their eyes do not see?

As Friend ages, the situation is sadly reversed and the pages become increasingly filled with mocking self-loathing, broken occasionally with childish self-aggrandisement. The figure of Friend that we come to admire in his youth turns into a frankly disappointing – and disappointed – old man. In an increasingly typical entry, in 1984, Friend writes, ‘I think I shall cease keeping a diary. My life is not interesting enough to justify it. The revelations in these pages show a sick old man whose talents decay with his body….’ Actually, Friend never lost his genius for draftsmanship – even after suffering a stroke – and his talent for written observation was certainly not dulled with age. It must be said, though, that this new collection does flag somewhat in the third act. One gets the feeling that in an effort to portray an even spread of Friend’s life, Britain may have marginalised some of his more interesting youth.

A major part of Friend’s life – and thus a major part of the diaries – was his sexuality. Friend’s frank accounts of homosexual life in a more unforgiving time make fascinating reading – for example, this portrait of an art dealer from 1938:

In those evenings in London, as often as not he’d propose either that we all three went to bed together, or he’d ring up a couple of pliant young guardsmen, a policeman and a few whores, and, standing pinkly nude, spindly legged and drunk by the gramophone, playing over and over again Ravel’s Bolero, would jovially burlesque the character of a master of ceremonies conducting the obscenity of an orgy.

More confronting is what Humphries refers to as Friend’s ‘benevolent form of paedophilia’. Friend’s relationships with countless young men and boys – usually in the tropics – are at times heartbreakingly romantic but often smack of the worst sort of sex tourism. Friend’s art is filled with beautifully rendered images of these young men, and it is no surprise that his emotional attachment to them is often even more powerful than his sexual attraction. Friend treats this subject in his diary, as with everything, with alternate bouts of profound honesty and self-delusion. In both cases it makes for interesting reading.

Donald Friend was a successful artist, but he never reached the absolute heights of critical and financial success in his chosen career. Rather it is the posthumous publication of his diaries that has brought him to the top of the field. As social commentary, a literary work and a unique self-portrait of an artist, Friend’s diaries are a truly great piece of Australian writing. It is fitting that a popular edition, complete with illustrations from the diaries themselves, has been now published. As a result, it is likely that Friend will no longer be thought of primarily as a visual artist – but as a literary one as well.

Rafiq Copeland is an itinerant television researcher.

My dad was the first person I knew to get a mobile phone. I remember when he first brought it home from work and my older sister and I marvelled over it, dreaming of the day we too would own a mobile phone. He hated it. He would swear and shake his head whenever it rang and forbade anyone in the house from buying one of their own: ‘It’s just work’s way of making me contactable at any time. I can’t leave the office now­­ – the office comes everywhere with me.’

That was more than fifteen years ago now, and how things have changed. With the advent of smartphones, the urban environment is a veritable sea of personal screens. Everywhere you go you see people sending messages and emails – while on trains, under tables during dinner and during seemingly intimate embraces – we just can’t seem to put our screens down. The only time this dependence on connectivity seems to be an issue is when there is no wireless connection. And then we often react with a sense of outrage. As the comedian Louis CK once commented on human’s reactions to technology, ‘how quickly we think the world owes us something that we knew existed only ten seconds ago’.

Hamlet’s Blackberry is a meditation on this new phenomenon of connectivity by media and technology journalist William Powers. Using his own personal experience with technology, Powers asks at what cost we surround ourselves with this maddening crowd of screens? Why can’t you watch a YouTube clip of your favourite singer to the end without your eyes straying to a scrolling news story? If you have four hundred Facebook friends, why do you still feel lonely? And if you go for a walk in the woods and you don’t tweet about it, did it really happen? The book acts as a self-help guide of sorts, encouraging the reader to lead happy, productive lives in a connected world by mastering ‘the art of disconnecting’.

However, the book is far from a luddite’s tome. Powers is quick to acknowledge the wealth of information and unparalleled options for communication made available to us through our beloved screens. But he contends that, in a world in which digital overload is the norm, the power of technology is best harnessed alongside ‘space’ – a momentary disengagement; that it is through letting your brain breathe that you can fully capitalise on the benefits of this technology. To illustrate this, Powers uses an example of a phone call he made to his mother while driving from an airport. The picture of his mother that appeared on his mobile phone as he dialled her number took him to a loving memory that gives him inner contentment. It is the mobile phone technology that triggers this moment of inner joy. However, he suggests that it is the time he had to reflect on the phone call afterwards that allowed his brain to travel to this inner space and engage with the memory. It is through this ‘space’ or ‘gap’ from the technology that Powers argues one is able to truly experience the ingenuity of communication technology. He explains that, ‘if you’re sitting in the office zipping from e-mail to e-mail to text to Web page to buzzing mobile and back again – that is, doing the usual digital dance – you’re likely losing all kinds of opportunities to reach the depth I’m talking about’.

And ‘depth’ is a vital for Powers, who defines it as ‘an understanding that comes when we truly engage with some aspect of our life experience’. He believes that the ‘digital dance’ allows us very few opportunities to engage deeply with our everyday life experience. It is this concept that Powers begins to unpack through his use of seven key historical figures: Plato, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Johann Gutenberg, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau and Marshall McLuhan. It is slightly disappointing that all the people that Powers uses to explore this modern phenomenon are dead white men. It’s even more disappointing that Powers notes this very fact in the first section of the book but does nothing to explain or expand on it, stating simply: ‘Great ideas have no expiration date.’

Thankfully, this early oversight is far from symptomatic and Powers masterfully unravels a nuanced interrogation of humans’ relationship with technology. He pitches the book’s tone perfectly, floating seamlessly between memoir-style narration to a more distanced informative tone. Since the subject matter of the book is so focused on the personal use of technology, any other approach would have felt insincere. And while at times it can feel that Powers is really reaching for his metaphors in these stories about connectivity in the lives of some these historical figures, it is beside the point as the book remains entertaining and intelligent all the same. Powers has a deft way of weaving fragments of history and sociology into his arguments without losing his vigour or pace. The chapter regarding Benjamin Franklin’s stringent life routines was particularly enthralling, despite its somewhat loose connection with the premise. With a charm similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s, Powers is so clearly interested in what he is talking about, it’s hard not to be too.

The book is unfortunately victim to a long creative prologue in which Powers takes his readers on a whimsical imagining of living these connected lives: we are all individuals in a gigantic room tapping each other on the shoulder. Oh brother. This section is uncomfortably clumsy for such a great writer, and you can’t help but wonder why it wasn’t cut.

The last section of the book is somewhat of a how-to guide, focusing on how Powers and his family put these lessons from the historical figures into practice. However, despite the depth and shadow of the preceding chapters, they merely disconnected their Internet on the weekend. I am not doubting the commitment that this took the family, which contains two freelance writers; it just seemed to be a rather broad stroke after we’d spent so much time on the details. Did we really need to read Plato, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Seneca, McLuhon, Gutenberg and Franklin for that? Surely there is a subtler, more engaged, more thoughtful way to disengage while still being connected?

Or maybe it really is simply that easy. My father had a similiar ritual with his hated work phone. He would dutifully turn it off on the weekends and at around 7 pm every night, swearing at all the Western Australians who’d call during dinner. When he started doing this, on Monday mornings he would turn it on and there would be message after message from people who’d tried to reach him on Friday night for some deadline or another. Soon they realised he was not reachable after 7 pm and they stopped calling. The same happened for Powers and his family.

Powers suggests that until companies begin to create options within our technology that allow reprieve, or ‘gap’, we will have to enforce it ourselves or face a world with diminished depth in thinking and an influx of overstimulated inactivity. He talks of premium vacation spots advertising ‘unwired’ holidays, where Internet service, or rather, the lack thereof, is an added extra to the overworked digital junkie. Christopher Poole, the founder of the cultishly popular imageboard 4chan, reports that he often gets emails from regular users who want to be banned from the website so they can be productive individuals IRL. It seems we are still far off from mastering what Powers calls the ‘art of disconnecting’. However, with insightful and engaging books like this, we are at least on the right path towards a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between technology and humans that is so often reported on, and so rarely examined.

Anna Barnes lives in Melbourne and writes plays, fiction and really good text messages.

ISBN: 9780670918874

RRP: $32.95

Publisher: Penguin

If you were to read the title, jacket blurb or publicity material for Robert McCrum’s new book you could be excused for assuming that it dealt largely with a modern phenomenon. ‘Globish’ or Global English is, after all, a relatively modish expression. You may be surprised, then, that McCrum starts his enjoyable Globish story more than two thousand years ago in the tar pits of Denmark.

It takes McCrum roughly 200 pages of the 268-page book to reach the postcolonial ‘Globish’ speaking world of the recent past. The bulk of this material – the history of the English language – has been well covered elsewhere, including a number of times by McCrum himself. Nonetheless, Globish offers a lively, entertaining account at a brisk pace and on this basis alone is a worthy addition to the fold. McCrum offers all the usual elements, from the Norman Conquest to the Gettysburg Address, with humour and a journalistic gift for anecdote. But it was always through the prism of ‘Globish’ that this book was going to offer something different.

The concept behind the word ‘Globish’ is not just that English is spoken globally, but rather that a new language – albeit one based on English – has been adopted around the world. If Spanglish is a Spanish-influenced dialect of English spoken in the Americas, and Tanglish is a Tamil-influenced dialect spoken in Southern India, then Globish is a globally influenced dialect spoken just about everywhere. If you have ever taken a taxi in Cairo or ordered from a menu in Vietnam then you have probably spoken some form of Globish. An important element of this new language is that it is not just a means of communication between English speakers and non-English speakers. Globish has arisen as the language of choice when two non-English speakers from different language backgrounds get together. A Chinese tourist taking a taxi in Cairo will probably be speaking Globish too.

‘Globish’, like so many words that have been co-opted by English, is originally French. The expression was coined by Jean-Paul Nerriére, a former IMB executive who observed that non-native English speakers often communicated better with non-native English speaking clients than a native English speaker was able. Nerriére decided this was because the non-native speakers were both speaking Globish, which he called ‘the worldwide dialect of the third millennium’. Like any pidgin, essential elements of Globish include a streamlined vocabulary, simplified grammar and the occasional resort to waving one’s hands around. There are currently at least two French/Globish handbooks in publication.

A slight problem with McCrum’s analysis is that he tends to confuse English and Globish. And it is certainly a difficult line to draw. For example, anecdotes about the UN or international big business increasingly relying on English for communication are clearly relevant, but at the same time do not quite support the idea of a new international tongue. If big business is dealing in true English, then surely this is a sign that Globish is inadequate for such complicated transactions?

Globish is a cracking account of the history of the English language and an appealing introduction to the concept of global English – but don’t expect it to be the definitive account of either subject. As McCrum demonstrates, the English language is always in flux, and its story is far from over.

Rafiq Copeland is an itinerant television researcher.

War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times
Linda Polman
ISBN: 9780670918966
RRP: $32.95

First, a little story.

In 1854 Florence Nightingale responded to a request from the British War office for volunteers to help care for sick and wounded soldiers from the Crimean War. Her experience of the intolerable conditions and the disregard the War Office showed its own troops led Nightingale to a lifetime of lobbying legislative bodies to improve conditions for injured soldiers and civilians alike. Five years later in Italy Henri Dunant witnessed the battle of Solferino and saw the 38,000 wounded soldiers left on the field after the armies had withdrawn. Dunant’s experience led directly to his founding the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Dunant’s organisation was founded on humanitarian grounds – aid was to be distributed wherever it was needed; a strict model of neutrality, impartiality and independence was championed. Nightingale was appalled. It was her view, she expressed to Dunant in correspondence, that an organisation like the Red Cross alleviated the responsibilities of warring governments. By providing aid on humanitarian grounds, on a voluntary basis and funded by charity, it would actually make it easier for armies to carry on killing one another.

In War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, Dutch journalist Linda Polman argues that the problems raised by Florence Nightingale in the nineteenth century are still central to humanitarian aid in the twenty-first.  In many cases the aid industry not only doesn’t help, it actually makes things worse.  If Polman is right then the implications are scary. Expressions such as ‘the pressing moral issues of our times’ are often bandied around – particularly by aid organisations and book reviewers – but in the case of humanitarian aid such hyperbole is not inappropriate. The idea that a human enterprise of the scale and moral certitude of the modern aid industry is failing on a massive, systematic level is surprising and shocking.

Polman’s list of grievances with the aid industry is long, but can be distilled into two essential points. The first is the moral dilemma faced by Nightingale and Dunant – that delivering aid on humanitarian grounds can lead to prolonging, supporting and even worsening the problem. In Ethiopia in 1984 the Mengitsu regime carried out a systematic program of terror in the rebellious Northern provinces – rape and murder, burning of grain, slaughtering of livestock, poisoning of wells. In the end more than £90 million was raised from private donors through Geldof’s own Solferino moment – the LiveAid project. The Mengitsu government forced all money spent in Ethiopia to be changed to local currency at an exchange rate of its choosing, using the profits to carry on its murderous program in the North away from the cameras.

The second point Polman makes is rather more mundane but almost as troubling. Polman blames much of the inadequacies she has witnessed in the aid industry on the very fact that it is an industry – that aid organisations are competing for contracts, fighting for access to ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘clients’ and battling for media attention.  These two factors, moral impartiality and free market competition, turn out to be a very bad combination. Let’s look at another example given by Polman. In 2002 US$150 million was set aside by donor governments for a house-building project in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province. The money was assembled by an aid organisation in Geneva, which – after taking 20% for its own use – then transferred the project to an organisation based in Washington. The aid organisation in Washington also kept 20% of the money, before transferring the contract onto another organisation, which then passed the contract on to a fourth aid group. The last group began the implementation of the program by using what money was left to buy a consignment of wood from Iran. The haulage company that delivered the wood was owned by the governor of Bamiyan province, and charged five times the regular fee. With the money now gone the wood arrived at the housing project, but when it got there it was discovered to be too heavy for use in construction of the traditional Afghan houses. In the end the timber was used for firewood.

One would hope that stories such as these were extreme examples, but it seems they are closer to normal than you would imagine. A Report by the British National Audit Office found that the Department for International Development (DFID) was failing to achieve ‘all or most of its objectives.’ DFID’s own subsequent report found that less than five percent of its projects were ‘value for money’ and only a quarter of them could be deemed successful. DFID programs in Afghanistan alone were worth £520 million at the time of the report.

Polman, a Dutch journalist, has covered most of the places that get a mention in War Games. She has published books about her travels in Africa, and UN interventions in Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti. With this long established interest in humanitarian interventions, it is unsurprising that Polman’s writing is filled with personal anecdotes and experiences, which merge seamlessly with wider analysis of the aid industry.

War Games is a deliberatively provocative book (the original title translates as Crisis Caravan, which I think is much better). Polman is clearly angry at the failures of the aid industry and she pulls no punches in her criticism. To begin with, this can seem slightly over the top, but as the figures and anecdotes accumulate it becomes easy to share her anger. How can this industry enjoy so much goodwill when it has done so much wrong? How can the same mistakes be made again and again? And how come we don’t read about these issues more often?

Clearly there are problems in the aid industry, and Polman rightly demands they be addressed. Interestingly, Polman the book by admitting she does not have the answers. Rather, she says, it is important to be asking the questions.

Rafiq Copeland is an itinerant television researcher.

European settlement of the new world is almost invariably portrayed as a purely human occupation or “conquest”. In ecological terms, however, the real conquerors of Australia were not humans.

Brian Coman, Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia

One of my earliest memories is helping my parents lay out poisoned carrots. I wasn’t allowed to handle the poison, but I like to imagine I provided some help finding the burrows. That was in the late 1980s, a few years before the RHD virus – or calicivirus – had its devastating effect on Australia’s rabbit population. By the time Brian Coman’s Tooth and Nail was originally published in 1999, RHD had all but wiped out the rabbit in much of the country. Poisoning rabbits was no longer a standard part of Australian childhood, and for any number of reasons – environmental, economic, animal welfare – this was a very good thing. The publication of a revised edition ten years on is timely; rabbit numbers in Australia are again are on the rise.

Coman has spent half a lifetime involved in rabbit control in this country, mostly as a research scientist for the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment.  He knows this material and is passionate about it. Tooth and Nail makes a compelling case that the rabbit is a major force in Australian social, economic and – perhaps most violently of all – environmental history.

Rabbits were first brought to Australia with the First Fleet, but it wasn’t until the 1860s, when rabbits were deliberately released for hunting – most notably by Thomas Austin in Geelong – that a sustainable population could be found in the wild. Within a couple of decades, rabbits were to be found in large numbers across virtually the whole of south-east Australia and were making significant inroads into Queensland. Along the way they were eating new growth shoots of native flora (which would eventually lead to deforestation), eroding the soil with warrens and competing directly for resources with Australia’s farming industry. Tooth and Nail is the story of how we have been fighting to control them ever since.

Just as academic history has a propensity to be dry as dust, so called ‘popular history’ writing has a tendency to be as light as candy floss. They can both be equally as dull. Coman walks the middle ground, bringing a serious and scholarly approach to Tooth and Nail, without being afraid to be entertaining. Actually, I imagine it might be hard for Coman to restrain himself from being enjoyable company. As someone with a long professional relationship with his subject, Coman may be expected to bring a personal perspective to much of the story. But his improbable stories, from ferreting for rabbits as a boy in Kyneton, to his uncle having to be taken home by a passing cream cart after getting ‘crook’ from distributing chloropicrin poison with a dessertspoon are surprising. It is these personal remembrances, accompanied by an evident passion for the subject that elevate Tooth and Nail above a moral tale.

Although this is a ostensibly a general history of the rabbit in Australia, Tooth and Nail makes no secret that it is also about the future. Rabbits still pose an enormous threat to our environment and agriculture. As Coman says, ‘in the case of planning for the future of rabbit control in Australia, there are only two certainties: there will be rabbits and they will cause damage.’ To a large degree, this revised edition of Tooth and Nail is a call to arms. Coman is explicit about history’s message: the time to act is now, before rabbits again get out of our control.

Publisher: Text Publishing

RRP: $25.95

ISBN: 9781921656385

Rafiq Copeland is an itinerant television researcher.