Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens, Amanda Lohrey. Quarterly Essay edited by Peter Craven, Black Inc., 2002. isbn 1 86395 227 6, rrp $11.95.
As a sometime lecturer in political science at the University of Tasmania, Amanda Lohrey has been close to the furnace in which the Australian Greens Party was forged. Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens is eighth in Peter Craven’s remarkable Quarterly Essay series: in it Lohrey charts the party’s history and describes its constituency. From her analysis, it is clear that efforts to label the Greens’ rise
as being nothing more than a function of the Democrats’ decline or a simple defection of Labor’s disenchanted Left are wrong-headed. Lohrey sees the Greens’ constituency as a new one, based ‘on a new paradigm or grand narrative of what politics is about, i.e. the “ecological” ’. That is not to say that
ex-Labor or Democrat or even Liberal voters have not felt disenfranchised by their old party loyalties and resorted to the Greens. But Lohrey makes crucial distinctions that enhance understanding of the Greens phenomenon, not just in Australia but worldwide. A Green vote can no longer be seen as soft‚ single-issue‚ or volatile. She also points out that as the Greens become more successful, the rhetoric against them will become more hectic in proportion to their perceived threat to established powers. The warning signs to Labor in particular are clear: John Button’s contribution to the series (Issue 6 Beyond Belief: What Future for Labor?) becomes even more interesting when read in conjunction with Lohrey’s.
Juliette Hughes
The Tournament, John Clarke. Text
Publishing, 2002. isbn 1 877008 37 0, rrp $28.00
Magritte and Dali are paired in a tennis tournment against Hammett and Chandler. They win, of course, with their capacity to change the game between points, and to play shots which land in a different dimension from the one they began in.
John Clarke carries off well the conceit of a tennis tournament in which the cultural icons of the 19th and 20th centuries are steadily despatched. His humour is not subtle, but it is knockabout and inventive. He
concentrates on what all tennis commentators see as the Heart of the Matter (Greene, incidentally, loses to Kazantzakis in four sets during the first round), the court chat between players and with court officials.
So, Fermi asks for a ruling on ‘whether “on” the line was “in”, in the same sense that “on the line”