Some of these pieces, like Peter Coleman's critique of Cassandra Pybus' The Devil and James McAuley , nail the lid down. With devastating flair. But you are left with no air to breathe. But enough taxonomy. I belong to the grateful school of reader and after many hours with this volume my response stayed mostly between elation and wonder at such plenitude.
Essays typically take personal risks.
Gillian Mears' heart-breaking excursion into Australian environmental politics gives you some idea of how far we have still to go, and at what cost. Michael McGirr uncovers other costs, other vulnerabilities, in the hard-lived life of Cardinal John Henry Newman and in all committed, or obsessive, lives. The historians, each in a completely different timbre, are particularly diverting. The rich travelled on the shoulders of the poor in Calcutta in 1811. Ken Inglis unpacks another ritual of recovery in his account of the long journey Australia undertook before it finally buried the body of the unknown soldier in the Australian War Memorial in November 1993.