Kim Scott noted in 2001 that the biographical notes accompanying his first two novels (True Country, 1993, and Benang: From the Heart, 1999) changed from ‘Kim Scott ... of Aboriginal and British ancestry’ to ‘Kim Scott ... one among those who call themselves Noongar’. Scott probed his self-identification to make a more confronting point: ‘There’s a shift in a sense of self. It indicates a journey, I think. Or is it the shiftiness of a charlatan? Are you worried that I am going to have an identity crisis in front of you, to bleed in public as Australia seems to expect of its Aboriginal people? In the interests of Reconciliation, you understand. Of sharing the history’ (Alfred Deakin Lectures, 14 May 2001). A more recent biography is even more layered: ‘Kim Scott’s ancestral Noongar country is the south-east coast of Western Australia between Gairdner River and Cape Arid. His cultural elders use the term Wirlomin to refer to their clan, and the Norman Tindale nomenclature identifies people of this area as Wudjari/Koreng.’

Why do you write?

It is often a transcendent experience of the kind all humans seek. Suffering is just part of the equation, but so is the intoxicatingly joyous feeling at the end of a day’s writing.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Some nights, yes. Many of my dreams have to do with the sea. Sometimes they concern Antarctica, an exciting prelude to going into the interior with other people.

Where are you happiest?

In snow, tobogganing with grandkids or cross-country skiing.

 On 8 September 2010, in the foyer of the Robert Blackwood Hall at Monash University, beneath the beautiful ‘Alpha and Omega’ stained-glass window created by Leonard French and connoting humankind’s endless striving for achievement, Monash University ePress became Monash University Publishing. It was very appropriate that the press should be launched by Barry Jones, author of Sleepers Wake! (1982), the ground-breaking and prescient work on the need for societies to adapt to the coming information revolution; chair of Senator Kim Carr’s Book Industry Strategy Group; and long-time advocate of more ambitious education and social policy.

In this age of throwaway digital images it is easy to forget that before the late nineteenth century the only means of conveying a visual image of an object or place was by drawing its likeness. For this reason, well-funded exploratory expeditions often included an artist whose role was to illustrate new and interesting people, landscapes, geological features, animals and plants. Australian examples include George Raper and John Hunter, officers on the First Fleet. The Baudin Expedition had Charles-Alexandre Lesueur; Mathew Flinders took botanist and artist Robert Brown; and Major Thomas Mitchell was himself a competent sketcher. The Victorian Exploration Expedition (Burke and Wills) included Ludwig Becker, one of our best natural history artists, who died of scurvy in south-west Queensland while a member of the backup Supply Party. Other artists remained in their studios and earned a living by providing illustrations for scientific journals or the popular press based on specimens, living or dead, which had been sent home by the explorers. Among the best museum-based artists who worked on Australian material were Sarah Stone and Frederick Frohawk, neither of whom, as far as I know, ever set foot in this country.

During the lead-up to the last United States presidential election, I found myself waiting for a train at the Princeton railway station with nothing to read. I picked up a copy of the student newspaper. Much of it was standard Bush bashing, intermingled with unrealistic expectations of what Obama might achieve. But one sentence in an editorial caught my eye: ‘It is time to end amateur hour at the White House.’ One of the great failings of George W. Bush’s presidency was the neglect of expert advice on the complex issues that faced America during his two terms. Ideology, prejudice and vested interests trumped properly informed judgements based on good research.

Conventional wisdom has it that writing comes second to life. Young American journalist Elif Batuman has a different idea. ‘What if,’ she suggests, ‘instead of moving to New York, living in a garret, self-publishing your poetry and having love affairs in order to – some day – write it up as a novel for 21^st century America – what if instead you went to Balzac’s house and read every work he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could find about him – and then started writing?’ In her remarkable and very funny début, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Batuman has done just that (though not specifically on Balzac) and written a book primarily about her relation to books.

Twelve-year-old Isabella and her best friend, Griffin, have been keeping themselves and three younger children alive in Grimsdon since a massive wave flooded the city three years ago. The children eke out a living by searching abandoned homes and buildings for canned goods and useful items. Isabella, the leader, makes good use of her fighting skills (implausibly explained by school fencing lessons) to defend the group against predators. Junior genius Griffin raises their standard of living by engineering electricity from wave energy, enabling the children to power machines and grow vegetables on the roof of the abandoned mansion in which they live. But the children’s tenuous grip on survival is constantly threatened by sneaker waves, which swamp them without warning, by unstable buildings sinking into the floodwaters, and by the sinister Captain Sneddon, who runs a protection racket from a boat anchored in the swollen harbour.

 The history of Australian rock music is rich and eclectic. Vanda and Young: Inside Australia’s Hit Factory and Behind the Rock and Beyond: The Diary of a Rock Band, 1956–1980 provide two perspectives on the early years of rock music in this country. John Tait, owner of a second-hand record and bookshop in Melbourne and a self-confessed ‘avid collector of Australian music’, has written the former book. Tait focuses on Harry Vanda and George Young, who rose to prominence during the 1960s as members of The Easybeats. This band achieved international success with such songs as ‘Friday on my Mind’, ‘Good Times’ and ‘I’ll Make You Happy’.

The Easybeats disbanded in 1969, but Vanda and Young remained active within the Australian music industry. The duo wrote songs for artists such as Stevie Wright (lead singer of The Easybeats) and John Paul Young, and produced music for AC/DC, Rose Tattoo and The Angels. In the 1970s and 1980s the pair developed a ‘cult following’ with a new act entitled Flash and the Pan. According to Tait, Vanda and Young’s music ‘perfectly mirrors Australian culture for its diversity, working class ethic, rebelliousness and sense of humour’. Yet their contributions to Australian music have been somewhat under-acknowledged. Tait reports that some of his customers give him a ‘blank’ stare when he mentions the pair.

Tait makes effective use of interviews with Vanda and rock music commentator Glenn A. Baker, among others. The author demonstrates a keen eye for changes in popular culture, and how these impacted on his subjects. For instance, he describes how The Easybeats arrived in London just as the ‘flower power’ movement was emerging in the late 1960s. The band ‘hated “flower power” with a vengeance’, and their music ‘did not fit in with the flower power culture’.

Australian war historians usually find their theme in the army. Mike Carlton, a well-known journalist, thinks it is time to praise the Australian warship Perth and its men: ‘They were the flower of Australia’s greatest generation. No other has been so tested.’

It is fair to suggest that the Perth is virtually unknown to the typical Australian today, and certainly less familiar than her sister ship, the HMAS Sydney. It is curious that a nation surrounded by sea and so reliant on the sea lanes tends to be more conscious of its racing yachts than of its warships; but that is what happens during a long period of relative peace.

‘Where were you born?’
‘Oh, we’re onto that kind of question are we?’
‘You wouldn’t believe in writing an autobiography?’
‘No, being born, going to school, having measles, being married or not wouldn’t really be an autobiography for me. An autobiography would be an inner statement, how one grew within, the hopes, the difficulties, the aims. But as I never do want to write anything about myself, no autobiography.’
‘You wouldn’t read a biography of a writer, you would read the work?’
‘Yes, that’s a beautiful question Robert, because the work is the biography.’

How complex a task it is to write the biography of a writer. For writers, whose daily business is making things up, the truest experience may be one they have imagined. All biographers need to be storytellers and private detectives, but the biographer of a writer must also be a literary critic, must account for how the work relates to the life and escapes the life; beyond this, how the experience of writing it might change how the author apprehends those other parts of experience, called facts.

The author of Mary Poppins (1934), P.L. Travers, consistently resisted questions about her life. As she declared to a group of students, ‘the work is the biography’. However, early on in this new edition of her biography, Valerie Lawson declares that her chief interest is in the life and not the work: ‘For me, Travers became more fascinating the more I learned of her mystery. That was what intrigued me most, not her subject matter, although I liked Mary Poppins as a child …’ Her statement in the preface suggests the character of this biography: crowded, lively, brisk, opinionated, personable and slightly at odds with its subject.

Certainly, Travers led a various and adventurous life. Born in Queensland in 1899, she worked briefly as a journalist and toured Australia and New Zealand with a Shakespearean acting troupe. In 1924 she travelled to England. For years she made a living there as a columnist, poet and drama critic. In Britain, George Russell (‘AE’) published her poems and became her ‘literary father’, introducing her to Irish and English literary sets: days, wrote Travers, ‘full of poets, full of poems, full of talk and argument and legend-telling and delight’. Lawson’s account of Travers’s friendship with AE is one of the book’s most intriguing and evocative elements. Through AE, Travers met her idol, Yeats; once, she sang him her setting of his poems to music. He responded, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, I couldn’t have imagined anything more like them.’ Later, AE confided to her, ‘Yeats is tone deaf’. ‘Oddly enough,’ writes Lawson, ‘so was Pamela.’

Travers found a different sort of mentor in the bizarre and fascinating mystic Gurdjieff – a sort of impresario of self-improvement, who influenced artists including Georgia O’Keeffe, T.S. Eliot and Frank Lloyd Wright. Katherine Mansfield, ill with tuberculosis, bled to death at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Prieure des Basses Loges, near Fontainebleau. Travers wrote biographical notes on Gurdjieff for Man, Myth and Magic: Encyclopedia of the Supernatural (1970–71). If these suggest the atmosphere that Gurdjieff fostered, they also illuminate some of Travers’s preoccupations: her interest in myth and in the creative value of masks:

It is a fact that Gurdjieff died in 1949, but since he gave his age differently at different times, the date of birth given here can only be approximate. This was all part of his enigma, of the sense he gave of deliberately playing a role … His whole life, for the biographers, has the air of an authentic myth, in the sense of something heroic and significant but not to be apprehended except in so far as he could, by these very disguises, mediate it to the general understanding.

Travers’s life changed with the Disney film of Mary Poppins (1964). Lawson details how Travers fought Walt Disney over his adaptation of her book. With characteristic feistiness, and limited success, she protested the idea of a romance between Mary Poppins and Bert, the poshness of the Banks’ house, the sugary nature of the songs, the loss of irony and subtlety, and the general sweetening of Mary Poppins. She told her London publisher that the film was ‘Disney through and through, spectacular, gorgeous but all wrapped around mediocrity of thought, poor glimmerings of understanding’. Her arguments with Disney suggest how precisely she imagined the world of her books; how, beyond money or success, she wanted them respected as literature. But she did like Julie Andrews – announcing, when she met her, ‘Well, you’ve got the nose for it’.

This biography spends comparatively little time on the experience and character of Travers’s adopted son, Camillus. Lawson is also fairly discreet about how this marvellous children’s writer related to her own child. Travers never told Camillus that he was adopted. By chance, supposedly, Camillus came across his twin in an English pub. In the preface, Lawson records how Camillus allowed her access to Travers’s desk: ‘tidying as I went, combing through each drawer, pulling out yellowing photos … I was all alone. Camillus left early and came home after I had gone.’ The anecdote suggests a combination of generosity and reticence in Camillus’s attitude to the biography.

However, the biography gives full expression to Travers’s own intriguing childhood. This has involved Lawson in some careful sorting of claims from facts. Travers wrote extensively and memorably about childhood, both in magazine articles and semi-autobiographical novels, but she was a disciple of Yeats and AE, as well as Gurdjieff. She believed in masks and in the inwardly true story. She even changed her name: Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff. As a consequence, Lawson at once draws on Travers’s childhood stories and discredits them.

Lawson attributes Travers’s embellishments and misrepresentations to snobbery, but perhaps there is something more than a moral question here. Travers said, ‘When I was in Hollywood the script writers said, surely Mary Poppins symbolises the magic that lies behind everyday life. I said no, of course not, she is everyday life, which is composed of the concrete and the magic.’ Travers’s embellishments and misrepresentations suggest how her imagination worked upon experience in what could well be called a writerly fashion: she made the past more effective as a story.

Lawson’s account of the parents takes its life from what Travers wrote. Travers’s characterisations are unforgettable. In that sense, perhaps, Travers was right: her stories have more energy than the bare facts do. Take these two anecdotes about her mother, Margaret. One hot Sunday afternoon, the blinds half-down in the bedroom, Margaret sat reading the story of the Crucifixion from a collection of Bible stories. ‘Lyndon began weeping uncontrollably for Jesus … Her mother said, “I take the trouble to read to you and all you do is cry and feel sorry … Dry your eyes, it was a long time ago.”’ Another time, weary of tidying up the children’s toys, Margaret seized Lyndon’s favourite doll and threw it across the room, telling Lyndon to put it away herself. The doll’s china face struck the bedstead and broke. ‘Mother, you’ve killed her!’ cried Lyndon. At once, Margaret picked up the pieces and sat weeping on the bed: ‘Forgive me.’

Of her father, Travers wrote, ‘He had Ireland round him like a cloak’; ‘Whenever he had taken a glass he would grieve over the sack of Drogheda in 1649 until everyone around him felt personally guilty.’ The father, born in England of Irish stock, left England young and worked on a tea plantation in Ceylon; then, probably, a sugar plantation in Queensland. Upon marrying, he took up work in a bank. A charismatic alcoholic, he died in his forties, bequeathing to his daughter his romantic dream of Ireland. She took his name as her surname. Travers wrote:

I had been brought up by a father who was a very poetic Irishman. It seemed nothing but Ireland would do … if we had a horse it had an Irish name, and an Irish pedigree … I grew up and was nurtured on the Celtic Twilight, Yeats and all. Therefore Australia never seemed to be the place where I wanted to be. My body ran around in the southern sunlight but my inner world had subtler colours.

When Travers Goff died, Great-Aunt Ellie cared for the family, just as she had cared for Margaret after Margaret’s father’s early death. Lawson describes Great-Aunt Ellie as ‘the prototype of Mary Poppins’. Gruff but generous, Ellie wore a hat with two pigeon wings and carried an ebony and ivory walking stick.

All the same, we are interested in Travers’s life because of her writing. Spare, impassive, fantastical and fascinating in their combination of magic and tough-mindedness, the Mary Poppins books survive Disney and Cameron Mackintosh. Travers said that her great interest was ‘the small perfection of the fairy tales, which had been ground down by centuries until only the essential remained. These were not entertainments for children, but the last remnants of myths.’ She wrote that fairy tales had ‘great things to teach us … [They are] carriers of a very old teaching, a religion, a way of life, a chart for man’s journey’. They ‘live in us, endlessly growing, repeating their themes, ringing like great bells. If we forget them, still they are not lost. They go underground, like secret rivers, and emerge the brighter for their dark journey.’

Travers understood her own work in such terms. In fact, she consistently resisted the label ‘children’s writer’. The treatment afforded children’s literature infuriated Travers: ‘It’s never respected as literature, it’s never given a high place in that sense.’ Probably, she should have accepted T.S. Eliot’s offer to have Faber and Faber take over the publishing of Mary Poppins; it might have raised the ambition of her interviewers. As it was, they repeatedly asked her, ‘Where does Mary Poppins come from?’ Once, Travers answered, ‘She never explains, that is her chief characteristic, and I think it must be mine … I don’t not explain because I’m too proud to explain, but because if I did explain, where would we be?’ Lawson characterises this answer as ‘arch and infuriating’, a ‘piece of Alice-in-Wonderland-like nonsense’. Why? The books take their energy from this mystery. What sort of answer could Travers have given?

Recently, a column in The Age’s Melbourne Magazine gave one example of what an explanation might sound like:

Verity Hunt-Ballard, who plays Poppins in the blockbuster Disney musical opening at Her Majesty’s Theatre this month, has an interesting theory. Maybe Poppins, an ageless extraterrestrial, was once Bert’s nanny: he’s in love but for her it’s strictly business. ‘My feeling is there is definitely a deep love between Bert and Mary but it’s not of this world,’ she says.

Originally published in 1999, as Out of the Sky She Came, this biography has recently been republished – presumably, as the thinking person’s merchandise for Mackintosh’s ‘blockbuster’. Hunt-Ballard offers the sort of interpretation Travers fought against all her life. Small wonder it made Travers difficult to interview.

Surely there is something admirable about such principled stubbornness. Lawson writes that Travers ‘fell into Walt’s embrace like a lovesick fool’; ‘Like a forgotten lover whose heart jumps at every ring of the phone, Pamela waited for an invitation from Walt Disney to attend the premiere.’ In fact, it appears that Travers stood up to Disney. When he did not invite her to the film’s première, she sent him a telegram declaring that she was in America and coming to Hollywood for it. ‘She was sure somebody would find a seat for her. Would he let her know details, time and place.’ Then she got her publishers to pay for her flight to Los Angeles.

Perhaps it is natural for biographers to lose patience with their subjects. Apart from anything else, they lead such detailed lives. Books, however, need a structure. Lawson breaks the biography into three parts, corresponding to the roles Travers thought a woman plays in her life: Nymph, Mother, Crone. Her main theme is that Travers sought male gurus and allowed them a profound influence over her life. She writes that Travers ‘spent her life searching for Mr Banks’. On the other hand, Travers supported herself, toured Australia and New Zealand as an actress, travelled to Russia in 1932, lived with women, probably as lovers, adopted a child, fought with Walt Disney, summered on 'Indian reservations in Santa Fe', and, in her nineties, liked talking to the punks on Kings Road.

Intriguingly, this emphasis on male gurus shapes Lawson’s reading of the novels, as well as the life. Barely speaking of the children in these books, Lawson makes the distracted, erratic, likeable Mr Banks a major character. ‘Mary Poppins’s impact on men and appreciation by Mr Banks is an expression of Pamela’s own desires’; ‘Mr Banks fulfilled many roles. He was the father, and lover, Lyndon wished she had’; ‘Lyndon’s father’s experiences, combined with bank problems involving her mother’s family, remained in her mind for life. Both spilled over into her portrait of George Banks, whose personality was as ambivalent as her father’s.’

This richly enjoyable and lively biography has this weak thread through it: it treats writing as therapeutic wish fulfilment. Yet how fantasy works in life is different from how it works in writing. Art has its own demands, its own formal quality and logic. Lawson’s Freudian interpretation of the Mary Poppins books misses the control and artistry of the writing. Travers had enormous respect for Beatrix Potter, praising ‘her understatement, her bareness, her surrealism, her non-explaining’. Lawson herself characterises the Potter books as ‘sweet little animal tales’. In a rare account of her writing process, Travers said that she ‘wrote very little, very slowly, had to grapple with the text, wanted to “bring much to little. I whittle and whittle, until there is only a spindle, a sliver”. The first draft was torture, the second not so easy, but the third “a wonderful experience”.’

One of the more robust responses to what has come to be called the New Atheism has been that of the influential literary critic Terry Eagleton. He weighed into the argument early with an aggressive and widely cited critique of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) in the London Review of Books, in which he charged Dawkins with theological ignorance. He extended his argument in a series of lectures, published as Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God debate (2009), which condemned the atheist movement for its allegiance to an outdated form of nineteenth-century positivism and for its optimistic belief in the virtues of progressive liberal humanism. His latest book, On Evil, is a kind of supplement to the debate, in which he attempts to drive home what he considers the naïveté of such a view.

Jennifer Maiden is a great experimenter – in a specific sense. In a 2006 interview in The Age she said: ‘I have always found poetry a useful tool for tactical and ethical problem-solving … I suppose it’s a laboratory for testing out ideas.’ Maiden works from an ethical stance, but not, as some critics and readers have assumed, a facile leftist one (whatever ‘left’ means in the twenty-first century). The poems in this latest book are mainly discursive, and many address political situations, issues and, more specifically, public figures and personae.

Although Maiden resists easy partisanship, her poetry excites very different responses, negative and positive. The characters in her poems that were based on real political figures in past books (Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Teresa and Princess Diana are featured in this book) have divided readers, as though these poetic figures are realistic characters rather than ways of examining how ideologies operate.

The Japanese people should admonish each other every morning before breakfast not to let their guard down in foreign relations, and only afterwards proceed to eat.

Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization

Not for forty years have Australians had real arguments with their governments about international relations. Many marched in 2003 against the Iraq invasion, but were ignored. Now, if the national obesity rate is any guide, Australians spend more time eating, partying and sleeping than having the earnest pre-breakfast discussions about foreign relations that Fukuzawa recommended.

Even the cover design of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s memoir gave me something to ponder. The title, which signals the father–daughter story, is linked with an engaging seaside photograph of the two of them. The father’s swimming trunks and the daughter’s bathing cap have an authentic 1940s look. Add to that a bland subtitle, Memories of an Australian Childhood, and the tough confrontations of the text may come as a surprise.

The subtitle is misleading in more than one way. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s childhood in Melbourne, brilliantly evoked, ends halfway through the book. Next come Melbourne University; the first steps in her distinguished career as an internationally respected historian; friends and lovers in a time of social and sexual freedom; friction with both parents, unresolved; then the ‘Escape’ from Australia and postgraduate years at Oxford, followed by the author’s first period of study in Russia.

When the book arrived for review, a paperback of 656 pages, my heart sank. Americans are the world’s greatest researchers. Reading it would be like drinking from a fire hose. But it began incisively, with a turning point in the 2008 presidential campaign that established Obama’s audacity as a ‘complex, cautious, intelligent, shrewd, young African-American man’ who would project his ambitions and hopes as the aspirations of the United States of America itself. Soon we were in Kenya, with Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, the Mau Mau uprising, and Barack Hussein Obama Sr, a promising young economist with a rich, musical voice and a confident manner on his way to the University of Hawaii. We also meet the most compelling character in the book, perhaps in Obama’s life: his mother, a seventeen-year-old from Kansas, intrepid and idealistic, who takes up with the dasher from Kenya, becomes pregnant and marries him.

From a clutch of novels including the award-winning Camille’s Bread (1996), Amanda Lohrey has now turned to shorter literary forms, notably two Quarterly Essays (2002, 2006), a novella (Vertigo, 2008) and this new collection of short stories. At the 2009 Sydney Writers’ Festival she publicly confessed her new leaning, arguing the benefits of genres more easily completed by both writer and reader and less likely to produce guilt if cast aside unfinished.

I do not share her preference, tending to enjoy looking forward to the next chapter of, say, War and Peace. But I am also an avid consumer of Chekhov’s short stories, one of the reasons for their strength being the way they compel us to mull over the extended, unwritten conclusion which preoccupies our minds well beyond the final full stop, and which makes our ruminations an organic but invisible complement to the author’s intention.

Jessica Rudd’s fiction début, Campaign Ruby, is witty and warm-hearted chick lit set against a convincingly painted and disconcertingly prescient political backdrop.

John Tranter has published more than twenty books since 1970. They include long dramatic monologues, a type of verse novel (The Floor of Heaven, 1992), prose poems and traditional verse forms. Starlight, his new collection, continues his ‘evisceration’, as he calls it, of other poets. His first book, Parallax (1970), signalled an important theme in his work: parallax is ‘the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions’ (OED). Tranter’s use of multiple voices competing for attention, overlapping and arguing, has often been his version of representation, where nothing remains fixed. The multi-voiced poems illustrate that all affectations and effects are also what makes us human, just as all poetry is partly an accumulation of past poems. Multiple voices distracting, interrupting, guiding the poem so as to annihilate any lyrical or godly single stance has been one of Tranter‘s driving intentions. The ‘Ern Malley’ poems also act as touchstones, proof that good poetry can be made from borrowing from varied sources. Tranter, who included all of the Malley poems in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (edited with Philip Mead, 1991), intends to show that crowds of voices, often melodramatic, as in The Floor of Heaven, are more exactly representative, composed of all the poet’s knowledge of culture, entertainment, and experience.

Interestingly, Stephen Burt’s essay in The Salt Companion to John Tranter asserts that an aggressive rebellion, followed by almost jaunty resignation, is a recurring attitude in some recent poems, even as the formal structures of the past decade have become more unusual. Starlight is mainly composed of poems that reimagine those of Baudelaire, Eliot and Ashbery.

Novelist Gilbert Parker’s appraisal of Brisbane, penned during his visit in 1889 and quoted by Matthew Condon in this new, impressionistic history of the city, is not one that Condon wants to repeat, yet is powerless to refute: ‘Brisbane is not the least poetical … There is a sense of disappointment, which grows deeper as the sojourn in the capital is continued.’

Condon, a journalist with The Courier Mail and author of six novels, deploys all of his literary talent to transmute the short history of the Queensland capital, and his childhood there, into art; with mixed results. Brisbane is a patchwork of mapping devices – memoir, history, journalism, narrative – describing an absence that, in the end, Condon understands as the definition of his city. The book’s defeatist tone, and Condon’s indistinct judgement, will resonate with expatriates, while possibly alienating current residents. General readers, however, will enjoy the wealth of civic information, the observations of a youth spent in Queensland and the penchant for the historically uncanny.

In or about that annus mirabilis 1968, Philip Roberts – academic, musician, poet and founder in 1970 of the poetry imprint Island Press – delivered a conference paper entitled ‘Physician Heal Thyself’, which considered eminent poets who had also been medical practitioners. (Roberts had gone from Canada to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to study medicine, but in a Pauline moment switched to Arts.) He spoke of William Carlos Williams, Miroslav Holub, and Boris Pasternak, among others. The climax of his paper was his consideration of Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, which he claimed had as its raison d’être nothing more or less than to serve as a vehicle for Zhivago’s poetry, which appears, if memory serves correctly, as an appendix. The tail well and truly wagged the tale.

Roberts’s elegant paper came back to me as I read Peter Kocan’s new novel, The Fable of All Our Lives, which contains many poems by its protagonist, Tait, poems that have already been published, in Quadrant among other places, over the signature ‘Peter Kocan’. In Peter Kocan’s novel, Tait is writing a novel about the Jacobite uprisings, the title of which is ‘The Fable of All Our Lives’. The epigraph, from Tolkien, is identical to that which prefaces Kocan’s novel. Though Tait’s novel and Kocan’s novel are not identical, the latter contains the circumstances under which the former is researched and composed.

It is a great pity that Efraim Karsh could not have read Raimond Gaita’s new collection of essays before completing his own. The essays might have prompted him to reflect that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not nearly as straightforward as he would have us believe.

Karsh is a leading figure in the ultraconservative Revisionist Movement of Zionism. As head of Middle East studies at King’s College London, he is an academic warrior. His self-declared task is to put any of us who dare to think that there might be right and wrong on both sides of the conflict firmly in our places. Palestine Betrayed, he declares, was written ‘to reclaim the historical truth’. This ‘truth’ is that everything that went wrong for the Palestinians was their own fault, or at least that of their scheming, untrustworthy leaders.

Ernest Gowers is remembered, if at all, for the writings on the English language which he undertook towards the end of his life. In 1948, at the request of the British Treasury, he wrote a small book called Plain Words. It was intended for the use of civil servants, not all of whom appreciated it, but it attracted a far wider audience, sold in huge numbers, and has never been out of print. An expanded version, entitled The Complete Plain Words, appeared in 1954. Subsequently, the Clarendon Press asked Gowers to produce a revised edition of H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926). He laboured on the task for nine years, completing it at the age of eighty-five.

Few who saw them will forget the grainy newspaper images of Australian drug traffickers Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers. Despite high-level diplomatic pleas from the Australian government, they were hanged at Pudu jail in Kuala Lumpur in July 1986 for possessing 180 grams of heroin. In the post-execution mêlée, their bodies were concealed by blankets, but one foot was casually left uncovered. The poignancy of those toes was heart-rending, their vulnerability encapsulating the brutal and ruthless efficiency of law in that region of South-East Asia.

Eight years later and 370 kilometres away, Dutchman Johannes Van Damme was the first Westerner hanged at Singapore’s notorious Changi prison under the island republic’s ‘no leniency’ laws for drug trafficking. This was just months after American teenager Michael Fay received four lashes with a rattan cane for graffiti crimes, despite Bill Clinton’s pleadings for the sentence to be rescinded. In 2005, Australian drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged at Changi, another in a shamefully long list of people killed by a secretive and intractable régime that had, by Amnesty International estimates, executed more than 400 people alone between 1991 and 2003.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the loosely related jihadi Islamist terrorist attacks that followed in a dozen countries, have left the world more afraid than ever of Islam.

Modern terrorism is not the only factor. The West has long had a problem with Islam. This perception dates back a full millennium to a time when Europe was in its dark ages and Islamic civilisation was blossoming. From the beginning, Western anxiety about Islam has been based on almost total ignorance. Well before there was any substantial contact between Europeans and Muslims, Islam was an imagined ‘other’ automatically cast as the opposite of everything that the ‘Christian West’ claimed as its legacy.

My Brilliant Career, the book Miles Franklin published in 1901 when she was twenty-one, cast a shadow over her entire life. It sold well and made her famous for a time, but it did not lead to the publication of more works. The glittering literary career foretold by the critics did not eventuate, at least in Franklin’s opinion. ‘The thing that puzzles me,’ she wrote to Mary Fullerton on New Year’s Day, 1929, ‘is how are we to know whether we are a dud or not at the beginning; I mean how long should a poor creature smitten with the egotism that he can write, keep on in face of rebuffs’.

Not having further success in Australia, she tried America, from 1906 to 1915, without avail, and then Britain, where she did manage to publish a number of novels under the ‘Brent of Bin Bin’ pseudonym. However, these brought no lustre to the Franklin name, because she resolutely refused to admit authorship.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of the 2010 election campaign was the intrusion of former prime ministers and aspirants to that post. Liberals had tired of Malcolm Fraser’s interventions long before he decided not to renew his membership of the party. Labor supporters did not welcome another round of bickering between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. The interventions of Mark Latham were hardly edifying.

Perhaps part of the problem is that Australia has not yet devised its equivalent of the House of Lords. All Australians would naturally reject the literal and metaphorical ermine trimmings associated with that body, but it still performs a useful role in providing an appropriate platform for those who have attained high office or made notable achievements in some field of human endeavour. By contrast, we have no equivalent institution, and few former prime ministers have found a suitable post-parliamentary role.

In August 1998 former ABC journalist Mary Delahunty won the by-election for the Victorian seat of Northcote. One year later, after Steve Bracks audaciously nabbed the premier’s crown from an unsuspecting Jeff Kennett, Delahunty found herself in charge of the education and arts portfolios. Her learning curve was steep. ‘If the chook shed was for parliamentary incubation then the dungeon provided sparse and smelly cells for the discipline of ministerial office,’ she writes in her new book, Public Life, Private Grief.

Three years after the Bracks government’s ascension, Delahunty’s husband of twenty-two years, former television executive Jock Rankin, died of cancer. In the months that followed, Delahunty juggled public office with the private role of rearing her two teenage children. Over time, the stress of managing their grief and her own took its toll; in 2005 Delahunty was diagnosed with depression.

It is an indication of the former education, planning and arts minister’s rekindled spirit that in 2010 she is ready to tell her story. Public Life, Private Grief is not a political memoir, although parliamentary anecdotes often feature. Delahunty also shines light on some of her eyebrow-raising public gaffes, ones which, at the time, left journalists, parliamentary colleagues and the public wondering whether this celebrity recruit was up to the task of managing various portfolios. With candour and eloquence, Delahunty relates a family’s story of dashed dreams, trauma, loss and emotional recovery.

This special issue of La Trobe Journal is guest edited by Lynette Russell from Monash University, and John Arnold, the Journal’s new general editor (since No. 82). Titled Indigenous Victorians: Repressed, Resourceful and Respected, it showcases new historical scholarship that draws on the State Library of Victoria’s unrivalled collections. Topics covered in the twelve essays are diverse: Aboriginal guides to the Victorian goldfields, fisheries in western Victoria, cricketers at Coranderrk, Lake Tyers Aboriginal settlement, the Victorian Aboriginal Advancement League, and government legislation relating to Aboriginal Victorians, among others.

One theme common in this issue is intimacy. Various authors in the volume grapple with the task of trying to understand the complex nature of interpersonal relationships in colonial Victoria. Journals, memoirs, scrapbooks and letters, as well as photographs and objects, are used to explore the often opaque world of emotions, attitudes and motivations that influenced inter-subjective experiences.

The two narrators in this intense novel are the same person at different ages: the child of eight years who struggles against sibling displacement; and his twenty-eight-year-old self, scarred by his early years and obsessively revisiting them. The narrative documents these two periods of emotional turmoil in the unnamed protagonist’s alternating monologues. This anonymity may signify a lack of a more integrated self, and will not be a problem for the reader. As reviewer, I will simply use personal pronouns when referring to him.

This is no ordinary sibling rivalry; Robert, the boy his mother dotes on and cares for, is a foster child, the latest in a sequence of boys she looks after in her own home. But Robert is unlike the other boys: he is quiet and well-behaved, his needfulness deep but not neurotic. That particular condition is the narrator’s, a small boy who has always felt second-best in his own family. His great attachment is to his father, a tolerant and compassionate man, a bit of a character who enjoys the colourful phrase. Cleverly, the father is passively quoted by the son, whereas the mother is given active dialogue, increasing the sense of conflict he feels with her. The son is tormented by the withdrawal of his mother’s love, and the adult he becomes compulsively revisits this anguish. If this makes the novel sound like an obsessively closed circle, that’s because it is.

Making News is Tony Wilson’s second novel for adults. It is a romp over the fertile ground of tabloid media, celebrity sports stars and family crisis. Lucas Dekker is the bookish teenage son of Charlie Dekker, a high-profile Australian soccer star who has just retired from the English Premier League. Lucas’s mother, Monica, has graduated from footballer’s wife to bestselling self-help writer, comfortably eclipsing her husband’s earning power in the process. When Lucas wins a young writer’s prize to become a columnist for tabloid daily The Globe, it seems as though he might follow in his mother’s literary footsteps.

But this family is unhappy in its own way. When Charlie is caught in a sleazy sex scandal with two call girls, it emerges that the incriminating footage was the work of a tabloid sting, by the very same tabloid that Lucas is now writing for. The set-up allows Wilson plenty of scope to wallow in the bathos of the British press. He enjoys himself immensely at the expense of football, celebrity and media figures, from Frank Lampard to Cory Hart.

We are in familiar stylistic territory here, somewhere between Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Steve Toltz’s recent A Fraction of the Whole (2008). However, while Wilson’s plot is bold and energetic, his prose lacks the sparkle or polish of Toltz’s book. Lucas is a sympathetic character, but his parents are two-dimensional, and it becomes in-creasingly difficult to stay engaged with the Dekker family as the book winds its way towards its climax. It may be unfair to compare Making News to a book as different as David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006), but Mitchell’s beautifully drawn coming-of-age study shows the depth that can be rendered by a more patient and deliberate novelist.

Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed Making News. Like many a successful footballer, Wilson makes up for a lack of superlative talent with energy, commitment and brio. He can also be very funny.

In his conclusion to this book, Kevin Brophy states a key principle of creative composition: ‘to be responsive to what happens, what is thrown into the mind, what one comes upon.’ This is at once a statement of advice for an artist at work, and a theoretical proposition.

Through the course of the ten essays that make up the volume, Brophy develops a hypothesis about the kinds of brain function involved in creativity and, in particular, the role of consciousness in relation to other mental and sensory forms of intelligence. Without drawing the terms ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ into play – a great relief to those of us who have grown weary of that inevitable binary – he suggests that the work of an artist or writer may be facilitated by an exploratory interest in the operations of consciousness.

What’s not to love about Arthur Rimbaud? Having run away from his home in northern France, the outrageous and outrageously gifted teenage poet landed on the Paris doorstep of fellow poet Paul Verlaine in 1871. There, he co-opted the twenty-seven-year-old Symbolist into his artistic enterprise of ‘derangement of the senses’, which soon saw the pair embarking on a torrid affair that culminated in their fleeing to Brussels, where Verlaine shot Rimbaud (although not fatally) and was jailed.

A man who knew when enough poetry was enough, Rimbaud wrote his famous A Season in Hell (1873) in the wake of this débâcle, and renounced poetry. He signed on with the Dutch colonial army to obtain passage to Sumatra, where he promptly deserted. Subsequent years took him to Cyprus and finally to Africa, where he became a trader in coffee, guns and – according to rumour – slaves.

Reading the editorials and listening to editor Lisa Greenaway speak at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, you could have been forgiven for noting a feeling of defeatism in Going Down Swinging’s sense of its own trajectory: a journal that has from the start, and each year since, been ‘destined to fail’.

Editors Greenaway, Nathan Curnow, and Ella Holcombe contend in the editorial for No. 30 that GDS is the ‘little magazine that could’; that seems to run on its own momentum. Thirty years old, the unlikely annual journal of new writing, poetry, graphic art and spoken word is certainly a little miracle. Which makes it something of a paradox. It seems to have spent the last thirty years going down and swinging furiously, but any devoted reader will tell you that GDS is an artistic institution. I think we can safely put such defeatism to rest.

For its thirtieth anniversary, the journal has involved a host of guest editors, including the founders, Kevin Brophy and Myron Lysenko. The resulting collection is unashamedly varied, ranging from the conventional to the divisively experimental. An inventive prose poem by Eddie Paterson, ‘Barbara Cartland Love Poem’, will frustrate as many as it pleases. The poetry, in particular the haiku, is strongest feature in this year’s offering.   However, Going Down Swinging’s unique feature is also its best. The graphic art is a worthy addition to the literary content. Each work is beautifully drafted, with some funny, quirky, intelligent and sad pieces that never take themselves too seriously. The cover art lacks the sparkle of previous editions, which have boasted some inspired artistic contributions. Love it or not, GDS’s pervasive interest in the spoken word shines here, with an international offering full of fine content.

The Australian Journal of French Studies special number on Jacques Rivette continues the journal’s tradition of ground-breaking scholarship. Rivette has long been acknowledged as both an important and enigmatic film director – in some respects even more challenging than his New Wave colleague, Jean-Luc Godard. Rivette’s work is notoriously difficult of access. Almost all his films are unconventionally long; the longest, Out 1 – Noli me tangere (1970), runs for almost thirteen hours. In all of them, narrative lines are deliberately unresolved and complicated, and made the more disorienting by the director’s improvisational filming methods; only exceptionally, such as with Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) or Va savoir (2001), have they attracted sizeable mainstream audiences.

The volume’s guest co-editor, Douglas Morrey, in his overview of existing Rivette criticism, reproaches it for dealing in generalities, and calls for more analysis of the films themselves. Many of the essays presented respond to this call: Roland-François Lack examines the place and meaning of Paris in Paris nous appartient (1961), for example, and Mary Wiles probes the aesthetic resonances between Out 1 and Boulez, Artaud and Ionesco. Other pieces cover the unfinished project Les filles du feu (begun in 1975), La belle noiseuse (1991), and Secret défense (1998). There is a delightful reflection by Alison Smith on Rivette’s lifelong interest in Pirandello. Another particularly stimulating piece is that of American PhD student Margaret A. Ozierski, on Rivette’s formulation of an art that seeks to subvert the containments and degeneration wrought in a world dominated by commodification.

Rivette’s opus, although canonical, is still insufficiently known among the wider cultured public. This anthology of essays provides an enlightening sense of the scope of Rivette’s work, and offers many convincing insights into the radical artistic practices that make this director worthy of ongoing serious attention.

It takes a talented writer to imbue history with colour and vivacity. It is all the more impressive when the author creates a compelling narrative. As an example of a burgeoning genre, A Few Right Thinking Men more than matches its historical crime contemporaries in both areas.