The Legal Labyrinth is a promised land of alliteration. It provides an account of the author’s experiences writing another book, Our Man K.
The ‘Kisch’ case, about a Czech who jumped ship in Melbourne, is examined in part 1. Kisch’s story is the focus of Our Man K. A depressing symmetry is evident between the arbitrary decision-making in the migration jurisdiction of 1934 and now. Kisch was a Czech journalist, born in Prague on 29 April 1885, who arrived in Australia in November 1934. As a requirement for his visa, Kisch sat a dictation test in a European language. By decision of a departmental officer under the then Immigration Act 1901 (Commonwealth), he was required to sit a dictation test in Scottish Gaelic. He took his case through the court system and the High Court ultimately held that Scottish Gaelic was not a European language and the test was invalid. Hasluck draws out well the contemporary themes of arbitrary and unjust decision-making in the application of migration law.
Part Two is a day-to-day account of the author’s experiences travelling in Vietnam for about one month. I read this at about the same time I attended a play called Vietnam: a psychic guide. The insightful playwright and actor Chi Vu noted:
Some travellers go to exotic places to pretend that people do not suffer deeply from their poverty and that they do not at times cheat and lie to try to escape it. Some people travel to let go of understanding what’s happening around them, to be as nude and deluded as children. It is easy to watch them walk with an air of stupidity about them, smiling at everything. There are those who travel to exotic places to feel sorry for the natives I wonder whether there is a sense of those travellers in Hasluck? For example:
We are approached, then pursued, by a small posse of grubby, half-naked street urchins. These are not just persistent hawkers of the kind we have become accustomed to in Hanoi, street kids on the make, but good-humoured; here we are confronted with the outstretched hands and the feral looks of the outcast.
Does he lean towards the first category? Part Two is the weakest part of the book, reading largely like a series of postcards written to a person he doesn’t know very well. It lacks depth, insight and reflection. That said, he uses the words ‘I