Free in Melbourne on a spring afternoon I went walking. Last time in Melbourne was mid-winter and the place was dirty and dull. It had recovered. In the capital of black I noticed an ecotourism travel company called Extragreen Holidays. Their advertising sign had the company name emblazoned across a very big jumbo jet.

When Her Excellency Quentin Bryce became our twenty-fifth governor-general, publicity focused chiefly on the fact that she is a woman. This was understandable, because she is the first of her sex to hold her country’s highest office; any notion that some anti-feminist “glass ceiling” hangs over the governor-generalship has been disproved, which is a very good thing, and we may all congratulate Quentin Bryce for having “got there”. And now could we all forget about that, and look ahead?

We sat at the crossroads; it was early in the rainy season and we all sweated gently in the humidity. I say crossroads, but really they were just dirt tracks. The one from the east led in from the coast and went on to the big lake, to the village where we lived and from which we had motored early in the morning in the Land Rover. The southern track wasn’t up to much but the north-going one went on to the diamond mines.

This month marks both the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice that ended the First World War, and the virtual passing of the “Great War” from living memory.

How on earth could such a manmade disaster happen? A look at the events of mid-1914 shows that democracy really does seem more peaceable than autocracy. If more countries had had democratic governments answerable to the people, there almost certainly would have been no war. Though it was a luxury few could contemplate ninety years ago, with the terrible sadness of the 10 million war dead, there has been fairly general agreement since that the war was simply a mistake, a calamity caused by relatively minor issues.

The press frequently carries comment on the contemporary difficulties of teaching history and in particular of interesting students in Australian history. I recall my own experience. Back in the 1950s at Sydney University, Australian history was an option in third year, following compulsory year-long surveys of Ancient and Modern European history. The lecturer for the Australian course was Duncan MacCallum, famous for launching the First Fleet late in second term—or was it early in third? He was the one eccentric professor for callow undergraduates to feel superior to. Other staff by comparison appeared able lecturers, but for the uninitiated proficiency can come at a cost, only realised later. MacCallum’s course stood out as a case of prolonged deferral, in the chronological not the postmodern sense. I wonder now what would have happened if Australian black “pre-history” had been on the agenda.

The Sydney Morning Herald staged a race recently over 15.5 kilometres from an outer suburb to the city centre, between six reporters travelling respectively by train, bus, car, bicycle, scooter and on foot. The scooter rider made it through morning peak traffic in twenty-five minutes, the cyclist in thirty-two, the motorist in thirty-seven, the train traveller in an hour and twelve minutes, the bus rider in an hour and fourteen minutes and the jogger (who got lost briefly) in an hour and twenty minutes.

... My father’s farm was situated at a locality called Perry Bridge, in between the Avon and Perry rivers. At the south of the property the Perry runs into the Avon, forming a sandy point of land, and shortly thereafter the Avon runs into a large lake. The lake is named for the Duke of Wellington, but the spit at the confluence of the Perry and Avon rivers, known as Boney Point, is named for an altogether more inglorious reason. I remember my father telling me how, well into the 1960s, you could still find bones and bone fragments on this sandy point from a massacre of the local Aborigines, the Kurnai, which took place in 1840. The massacres of the Aborigines in Gippsland often occurred near water, to which the Kurnai were driven and then trapped. The massacre at Boney Point took place after a settler was killed and sheep were found with their legs broken. It is not clear how many Kurnai were killed at Boney Point, but four years afterwards, in 1844, a missionary found so many bones and skulls at this place that it could have been mistaken for a native burial ground.

Just under three years ago, in the third chapter of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China, I argued that too much strategic planning with regard to China appeared to be based on simple linear extrapolations of macro-economic growth trends. We need, I wrote, to engage instead in some reasonably sophisticated scenario planning, if we are not to find ourselves caught out by strategic surprises in the decades ahead. More generally, there is a case to be made that too much strategic planning is based on linear and predictive thinking, laying traps for the unwary.

Even as the book was in press, I had the pleasure of reading Philip Tetlock’s remarkable study Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? His data showed that linear forecasting by experts in the domains of politics and geopolitics has a dismal track record—it is almost as random in its success rate as that of expert forecasting in financial markets. However, his findings as regards the utility of scenario planning were hardly more reassuring. It can actually be counter-productive, he argued, by causing us to misread the relative probabilities of various dramatic scenarios.

Immediately following the murderous al Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Australia’s Prime Minister, John Howard, who happened to be in Washington at the time, “invoked” the ANZUS alliance. The far Left apart, the general response in Australia was to nod wisely and agree that this invocation was appropriate. None of the wise ones in government, academe or the media questioned its necessity.

There is in fact no requirement in the ANZUS treaty for it to be invoked. If there were, it would have been more appropriate for the United States as the party under attack to invoke, that is to call upon, the aid of its treaty partners. Howard’s invocation was little more than political spin driven as much by emotion as anything else. The treaty does not require invocation in response to any particular event; the treaty is always in effect.

Viewed solely as fictional drama, the ABC’s Bastard Boys, a two-part series televised in May 2007, is a high-quality production. But its claim to fictional licence is qualified by a parallel claim to documentary truth, in that it purports to present the story of the 1998 maritime dispute and its major participants with a reasonable degree of historical accuracy.

In a smashing new history of the thirties, David S. Bird re-examines the “devil’s decade” in his book J.A. Lyons—The Tame Tasmanian. What we learn from Bird’s book is, first, that Joe Lyons may have been misjudged, and second, quite a bit about the period when Australia began to take itself seriously in foreign affairs—particularly in the Pacific region.

This is a very long book—even though it runs for a little over 300 pages. Any reader of this biography/hagiography of Dame Enid Lyons needs to settle down to the task with a spirit of determination and perseverance. Like Dame Enid, you need to be in it for the long haul.

You miss them when they’ve gone, the “three bad (or more kindly wild) men” of Sydney newspapers: Ezra Norton, Frank Packer and R.A.G. (“Rags”) Henderson. All three were real cards, bullies with distinctive acerbic wit laced with well-chosen expletives, a touch of the rogue, not altogether admirable or great for journalists to work for but prone to capricious acts of kindness and responsibility on their own terms.