Clendinnen explains some of the complexity of the process in 'Beginnings', the first chapter of her 1998 award-winning study, Reading the Holocaust . I had felt a similar repugnance before. I had circled the Aztecs of Mexico for years before I decided to write about them, because I was unwilling to commit myself to the full pursuit of a people for whom the ritualised killing of humans was, in some seasons, a daily event. Full imaginative engagement' is a discipline, not a wallow in someone else's misery or a vicarious slather in their evil. Or even in their goodness.
Goodness is just as difficult to fathom as evil.
But full imaginative engagement is not the norm in Australian public life at the moment. Rather we are encouraged to huddle, or manoeuvre in our mainstream boxes, praying all the while that the cardboard will keep out the infection of the other. I watched Inga Clendinnen's 'full imaginative engagement' in operation one night. It has edges as sharp as a chiton's teeth. It was early this year, on one of the many occasions when Clendinnen was talking in public about the genesis of her most recent, autobiographical work, Tiger's Eye .