When looking for wisdom, it’s a good idea to range widely.
Writing in the years after the Great Crash of ’29, James Thurber noted that company heads had started to speak double-talk in low, muffled tones ‘because nobody knew what was going to happen and nobody understood what had.’
In contrast, the voices in these essays are strong. The language is direct and there is confidence in its expression. It made me wonder about what had happened in the year to elicit such certainty.
In politics, big moves detonated big responses. While the ‘coup’ against Kevin Rudd still smarts in some quarters of the Labor Party, there were arguments and counter-arguments about why it happened and whether it was inevitable. Two essays approach the nub of the matter from different sides of the fence. There was much analysis of big personalities. David Marr’s essay on the gladiatorial Tony Abbott may well make waves beyond 2012, as did his previous dissection of Rudd, which turned, for a while at least, into a political autopsy.