Thought Leadership and Opinion Archives - Clover Hill Diaries

Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

At this stage of my life, The Narrow Road to the Deep North reads as a study in justification.

Richard Flanagan moves through every camp, every mind, every moral universe. Prisoners. Surgeons. Lovers. Japanese officers bound to the Emperor. Each inhabits a logic that makes sense from the inside. Honour. Duty. Survival. Desire.

History turns on those private narratives. People act. Then they explain. The explanation hardens into belief. The belief becomes identity.

Flanagan’s range unsettles because it removes the comfort of certainty. He shows how lived experience shapes language, posture, allegiance. A man formed by hunger speaks differently from a man formed by command. A nation formed by defeat remembers differently from one formed by empire.

The novel widens the frame. It reveals how easily righteousness takes root. It shows how repetition grows from persuasion rather than ignorance.

The horror sits in the background. The real force lies in the anatomy of self-justification.

I read “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in the way I now read many war novels, I moved past much of the graphic brutality. I understand what the railway was. I did not need every blow described. I was fascinated by Flanagan’s willingness to enter the minds of the Japanese officers and show how honour, obedience and Emperor worship formed a moral world in which cruelty could be framed as as duty, even virtue, and suffering recast as proof of loyalty.

This mythic language, set inside an operating theatre, shifts the scale. A surgeon who once carried himself with absolute command feels the weight of his own humanity. The hand that once cut clean now trembles. The body remembers. The past intrudes.

“He had stolen light from the sun and fallen to earth. For a moment he had to turn away from the table and compose himself, so that the rest of the team would not see his scalpel shaking.”

The horror in the book becomes more unbearable because the prose is so luminous. Beauty heightens contrast. When a writer can render tenderness, love, memory, even desire with such precision, the brutality feels sharper.

You do not need to read every detail of suffering to recognise that power. The architecture of the book carries it. The moral weight is present in the pauses, in the fractured relationships, in the way time folds back on itself.

Flanagan writes extremity, yet he also writes longing. He writes shame. He writes the ache of love that never resolves. That is what makes the novel extraordinary.

The railway is the crucible, yet the book is about what remains afterwards.

I responded to the beauty of the sentences as much as the history.

For me that is enough.

We Keep Arguing About Grace Tame and Ignore the Real Question

I have watched the commentary around Grace Tame spiral into familiar territory. Some defend her. Some attack her. Some wait for any misstep. The arguments become about slogans, tone, delivery.

Meanwhile, the original political decision sits largely untouched.

Reading through the comments on a right-leaning news site, I came across a thoughtful defence of her right to speak. It reminded me that human rights advocacy does not vanish because someone disagrees with the politics of the moment. Courage is not conditional.

I would have preferred that a particular slogan not be used. It distracted from the substance. Yet focusing only on the slogan misses the larger question.

What was the judgement behind inviting the Israeli president at this time?

Leadership is not only about protocol. It is about reading the room. It is about understanding how divided the public mood already is. It is about recognising when symbolism inflames rather than steadies.

We can debate Grace Tame’s language for days. That is easy. The harder and more necessary question concerns political judgement at the top.

If we are serious about social cohesion, that is where attention belongs.

This is about asbestos. It is also about memory, power, and who gets protected.

Toxic City: Asbestos, Amnesia, and the Collapse of Care lays out a story many in Shoalhaven already recognise. Swift action when risk sits inside council walls. Silence when that same risk sits in a small village, under roads, near creeks, beside homes.

This is collaborative community advocacy at its best, from Spark Shoalhaven in Politics. It opens with a preface by Cat Holloway and centres the long, sustained work of Peter Allison. His work is seminal. It shows what happens when ordinary people keep records, keep asking questions, and keep going long after institutions move on.

This is about asbestos. It is also about memory, power, and who gets protected.

How many versions of this reckoning do we need before we all stand up, in some way, no matter how small.

First they came for a small place.
Then they came for people without power.
Then they came for something they should never have ignored.

If you live in Shoalhaven, read it.
If you care about how councils work, read it.
If you wonder how systems drift away from accountability, read it.

And if you are part of a group somewhere else, watching something similar unfold, this is an invitation. We are learning that shared stories, shared evidence, and shared pressure travel further together.

Are you feeling swamped by the world’s biggest problems?

Do you feel overwhelmed by the biggest issues shaping everyday life climate disruption, housing pressure, food prices, insurance, government spending? I did too.

For a long time my response lived in my head. Reading more. Arguing better. Feeling frustrated that public debate kept sliding into blame. None of that helped. What shifted things was doing something much simpler. I joined groups. I went to workshops. I put myself in rooms with people who were already translating big problems into practical action.

I have written before about the victim triangle and how easy it is to slip into it when the world feels out of control. What I learned through participation is how people climb out of it. Not by pretending the problems are smaller, and not by blaming others, but by reconnecting with responsibility and control.

One of the clearest examples for me has been Farmers for Climate Action. What works in spaces like this is not ideology. It is community. You learn alongside others. You share uncertainty. You are shown where effort counts. No one is cast as a villain or a victim. People are treated as capable decision makers.

That pattern repeats across other community based organisations like Landcare. Workshops, peer networks, and practical forums all do the same capacity and capability building work. They replace overwhelm with participation. They turn big abstract issues into things you can act on with others.

This is the shift I wish we talked about more. When people feel powerless, blame becomes a coping mechanism. When people feel supported and capable, responsibility returns.

If public debate feels stuck, it may be because we keep asking people to care without showing them how to act. The way forward is not louder arguments. It is clearer pathways and communities that make engagement feel possible.

That was the circuit breaker for me.

HT to Maryvonne Norman whose excellent Fb post prompted this article

The Kath and Kim meme that turned into a sharp little lesson in public disagreements.

Image Source Facebook

I shared this Kath & Kim meme on Facebook as a reminder. It turned into a sharp little lesson in public disagreements.

It’s doing what satire does best. Pointing at a pattern and trusting people to recognise it. Old ideas come back. The language changes. The instincts don’t.

One response I received took it as a literal claim, as if I were saying these moments in history are the same thing. That reaction lingered longer than the disagreement itself.

Public disagreements often split at a deeper point than the issue being argued.

It made me think about how differently people respond when something presses on identity.

Some people can sit with that pressure. They adjust their view. They accept that history leaves fingerprints on the present. Connections don’t feel dangerous to them.

Others move quickly to shut it down. The first move is separation. These things have nothing to do with each other. End of discussion.

That explanation doesn’t fit what I’m seeing. What feels more relevant is how comfortable people are with revising a view.

Ideas don’t disappear. They travel through history, change names, and slowly get normalised.

If you’re able to admit error, patterns become visible. You expect ideas to repeat, to reappear with better branding, to sound more reasonable the second time around.

People who can revise a view tend to treat history as something you learn from.

If that admission feels too costly, history stays boxed up. Each event stands alone. Calling things “unrelated” keeps the present uncomplicated.

What this exchange clarified for me was that we weren’t arguing about the meme. We were talking past each other. One response was about continuity. The other was about containment.

The difference shows up clearly in conversations like this.

That realisation took the edge off.

It reminded me that people arrive at conversations with different limits, different stakes, and different reasons for holding the line where they do.

How do societies notice patterns early if they refuse to look at where ideas come from?

Often the most telling part is not what someone objects to, but what they refuse to connect.

Looking for a win where there isn’t one

Cartoon by Roz Chast, published in The New Yorker. Used here for the purpose of commentary and review.

This cartoon by Roz Chast has me frozen at my desk. Elbows planted, fists pressed either side of my mouth, mind ticking over.

A row of lottery balls. Each carries something that holds up on its own. A fraction. A negative. A Roman numeral. Pi. Side by side, they suggest a winning combination. Side by side, they amount to nothing at all.

What I feel first is a sense of helplessness. A reminder that we can only control what is in our control, yet so much feels out of our control. The numbers sit there calmly, as if daring you to argue with them. You cannot. They are correct. They also get you nowhere.

I recognise this feeling. We live inside it.

We gather facts from different places and trust they will cooperate. Data, personal experience, expert opinion, history, instinct. Each comes with its own logic. Each carries weight. Then we stack them together and expect coherence, certainty, reward. When that does not arrive, frustration creeps in.

The digital age feeds this habit. It is a gift. It is also a curse. Access to information feels like power. Volume feels like progress. Speed feels like clarity. What it often delivers is overload. Different systems of meaning collide on the same screen, stripped of context, flattened into equivalence. Everything looks equally convincing. Nothing quite adds up.

The cartoon also speaks to fairness. Even if these numbers were drawn, the system would refuse them. No payout. No recognition. Rules matter. Frameworks matter. Outcomes only count when they are recognised by the structures that govern them. This is uncomfortable to sit with, especially for people who value effort, evidence, and good faith.

I find myself thinking about public debate, policy, community conflict, even family conversations. We argue as though there is a single winning combination. If we explain it better. If we add one more piece of information. If we line things up more neatly. The cartoon suggests something else. Sometimes the issue is not effort or intelligence. Sometimes the pieces belong to different games.

I do not feel smarter after looking at it. I feel more aware of the limits, and of how often I ignore them. There is no win in it. Just recognition.

When will we start responding to risk before people are harmed

We are very good at responding to shock.

After something terrible happens, systems move quickly. Reviews are announced. Events are isolated. Responsibility is narrowed to a moment, a person, a place.

The figures state what cannot be ignored. In the most recent year, 3,307 deaths were recorded as suicide. Seventy-nine women were killed by domestic violence. Thirty-three Aboriginal people died while in custody.

Different circumstances, different systems, the same outcome.

None of these deaths arrived without warning.

Risk does not appear suddenly. It accumulates. It shows up in missed follow-ups, thresholds that are too high, services that do not speak to each other, and responsibility that slips sideways between institutions. It lives in the space between what is known and what is acted on.

Prevention does not come with a single defining moment. It rarely produces a headline. It relies on noticing patterns early, intervening sooner, and treating risk as something to be managed over time rather than explained after loss.

If we are serious about safety, the question is not how decisively we respond once lives are lost.

It is whether we are willing to respond while there is still time to prevent harm, even when the story has not yet forced our hand.

When leadership mistakes discipline for strength

The Liberal National Coalition is back where it started, fractured, performative, and unable to hold itself together when pressure arrives.

Eight months after the post election split and awkward reconciliation, the Coalition is again unravelling, this time in full public view. The immediate trigger is procedural, Nationals frontbenchers quitting the shadow ministry after Sussan Ley insisted three Nationals resign for crossing the floor on the government’s hate crime bill. The response from National’s Leader David Littleproud was escalation, not resolution.

As Michelle Grattan observed, Ley was boxed into a no win position. Shadow cabinet solidarity is not optional theatre, it is the basic mechanism that allows an opposition to function. Ignoring the breach would have weakened the role itself. Enforcing it exposed how little authority the structure now carries.

This is the leadership failure. Not the rule enforcement, but the absence of relational authority that makes rules workable.

True leadership shows itself before a crisis, not during the press conference that follows. It builds shared expectations early, it names boundaries clearly, and it invests in trust so that discipline is not mistaken for punishment when it arrives. When that work is missing, every corrective action looks like aggression and every disagreement turns into a test of dominance.

What we are seeing is a coalition that treats leadership as positional rather than relational. Titles exist, but consent does not. Authority is asserted rather than carried. The result is a constant cycle of brinkmanship where internal players use public exits to gain leverage, knowing the system lacks the cohesion to hold.

The timing makes this worse. With the government under pressure following the Bondi attacks, the opposition had an opportunity to demonstrate resolve, seriousness, and focus. Instead, attention swung inward. The message to the public is confusion, not authority.

The pressure on the Nationals leader is just as telling. David Littleproud abstained rather than lead, then framed the decision as procedural while insisting the Coalition relationship remained intact.

It is the language of someone managing fallout, not setting direction. When a leader cannot carry their party with them on a defining vote, and cannot clearly own the consequence of that choice, authority drains away.

The public sees a leader under constant internal pressure, responding to events rather than shaping them. In moments like this, leadership is revealed not by statements about unity, but by whether anyone is still prepared to follow.

We have explored this in previous posts . Leadership that relies on control rather than legitimacy collapses under stress.

Organisations that confuse unity with silence find themselves brittle when disagreement appears. And when leaders inherit broken structures without repairing how power is exercised inside them, every decision becomes combustible.

The Coalition’s problem is not ideology or personality. It is structural. Until leadership is understood as something built with others rather than imposed on them, these crises will keep repeating. Different actors, same script.

Leadership is not tested by loyalty in easy moments. It is revealed by how disagreement is held without the whole structure tearing itself apart.

The Goodreads reading challenge and other suggestions I declined.

Every January, Goodreads acts. It prompts readers to set a reading challenge, choose a number, track progress, and share results. The message sounds cheerful. The structure sits underneath it is managerial.

I feel frustration at an app assigning me homework. I want to scream.

Reading entered my life as refuge, curiosity, argument, and pleasure. I read when a sentence catches or a character resonates. I follow books that open doors I did not know existed. None of that needs a target. None of it improves when measured.

When Goodreads introduced the challenge, reading changed shape. A private exchange turned into a task list. Pages became units. Books became ticks. A progress bar stepped into the space where attention once lived. Speed started to count. Comparison followed. A long novel began to feel like a poor choice, while a slim book felt efficient. Pleasure slipped toward performance.

Some readers accept this frame. They describe the challenge as motivation. Life feels crowded. A number promises structure. For them, the system works as intended.

I read in seasons. Some years I read fewer books and let them linger. Some years one novel rearranges how I see the world. Other times I move quickly, sampling voices, following a line of interest wherever it leads. None of those choices respond well to measurement.

A reading challenge does not allow for rereading a paragraph because it sounded better in theory. It does not recognise abandoning a book that feels wrong for this moment. It assumes more equals better. It assumes finishing equals success. Reading does not work like that.

The cost shows up when reading begins to feel like unpaid labour. Daily reminders feel less friendly than supervisory. The act starts to resemble fitness tracking, streaks protected, output optimised. Competition seeps in. Who read more. Who stayed on track. Who fell behind. Numbers replace attention. Curiosity thins out.

So I ignore the challenge. I do not set a number. I do not track progress. I let books arrive and leave as I choose.

Reading gives me enough without asking me to prove anything back.

Australia Day keeps circling the same argument and no one seems interested in finding a way through

Every January, the country walks back into the same argument.
The same positions.
The same anger.
The same sense everyone has said this before and nothing has shifted.

Australia Day is held on 26 January because it marks the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788 and the beginning of British colonisation. This history sits at the centre of the debate. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, 26 January marks invasion, dispossession, and the beginning of harm that continues across generations. Calling it Invasion Day reflects lived experience rather than provocation.

At the same time, some Australians hold tightly to 26 January. For them, the date represents continuity and belonging. Changing it feels personal, as though something familiar is being taken away. Others move through the day without much thought beyond a public holiday, yet still find themselves pulled into an argument that demands a position.

What strikes me is how little effort goes into finding a way through this. Disagreement isn’t unusual in a country like ours.

What is unusual is how willing we are to let the issue sit unresolved. There’s no shared story about 26 January, no careful listening, no attempt to imagine a future that isn’t stuck replaying the same fight.

Instead, the debate gets funnelled into the same places each year. Social media. Talkback radio. Morning television. Volume replaces curiosity. Language sharpens. People dig in. By the end of January, many people feel bruised and unheard, and the country feels smaller rather than stronger.

From the outside, this reads less like a national conversation and more like neglect. Neglect of history. Neglect of people who carry its weight. Neglect of the responsibility that comes with living together on contested ground.

Other countries with difficult pasts have taken different approaches. They separate remembrance from celebration. They create space for truth to be spoken without rushing people toward agreement. They accept that shared life asks for patience and sustained attention over time.

Australia avoids that path. Australia steps around what living together requires. We argue about 26 January, defend our ground, and return to our corners. The deeper question rarely holds the centre.

What kind of country are we trying to be, and how do we want to live with each other?

Until that question leads the conversation, Australia Day will keep returning as a fault line. Each year it exposes the same cracks, not because the issue lacks answers, but because choosing the easier option has become routine.

And next January, the cycle will begin again.