To highlight Australian Book Review's arts coverage and to celebrate some of the year's memorable concerts, operas, films, ballets, plays, and exhibitions, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate their favourites – and to nominate one production they are looking forward to in 2016. (We indicate which works were reviewed in Arts Update.)

Robyn Archer

I'll begin with Bleach* Festival's The Inaugural Annual Dance Affair and TIDE (forty-eight hours on a sand bar), by Gold Coast's resident contemporary dance company, The Farm. Then, Brink's beautiful Aspirations of Daise Morrow (Arts Update) – purely Australian, elevated by Patrick White – a quartet of actors intertwined with the Zephyr Quartet. Melbourne Festival/ANAM's Quartetthaus and astonishing Bartók, Secull House, and Richard Tognetti on Haydn: all at close quarters. Finally, the core quartet in Toni Morrison and Peter Sellars's Desdemona (Arts Update). Epic narrative exquisitely delivered.

Ben Brooker

The one play I regret not writing about this year was Dream Home, Melbourne playwright Emilie Collyer's surreal, bitterly funny skewering of the Great Australian Dream of home ownership. Subsequent productions may find this near-faultless indie première a hard act to follow.

My highpoint of Adelaide's festival season was UK performance artist Bryony Kimmings's Fake It 'Til You Make It. Exploring depression in men through the lens of her partner's experience of it, Fake It effectively streamlined Kimmings's stylistic eclecticism in what seemed a joyous reinvigoration of the confessional performance art genre. Adelaide was also lucky to have hosted PP/VT (Performance Presence/Video Time), a survey of past and present Australian performance artists at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation. A surging international interest in experience-orientated art made the exhibition a timely and illuminating exercise.

Technically, Neil Armfield's King Lear at Sydney Theatre Company – with Geoffrey Rush in the title role – is happening this year but, as I won't get to see it until January, it's my nomination for the show I'm most looking forward to seeing in 2016.

José Carbó as Rodrigo, Count of Posa, Diego Torre as Don Carlos and Giacomo Prestia as Philip II in Don Carlos (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Tim Byrne

In a reversal of last year's dominance by Melbourne's independent theatre sector, this year saw the re-emergence of the major companies; the behemoths can still produce electrifying art. Opera Australia gave us grand spectacle as political intrigue with Elijah Moshinsky's chilling production of Verdi's Don Carlos (Arts Update). It married epic reach with spiritual intensity and contained several unforgettable images.

Malthouse Theatre, in a co-production with STC, brought us Caryl Churchill's ingenious treatise on modern human interaction, Love and Information. Exploring the sometimes seismic chasms between our words, it was a dazzling example of content dictating form. Alison Whyte, as a prehistoric museum exhibit, was the funniest thing on stage all year.

Finally, MTC's production of Simon Stephens's Birdland was an unmitigated triumph. In what was surely the performance of the year, Mark Leonard Winter sucked the oxygen out of the auditorium as a petulant rock star in free fall.

If he manages to find a theatrical language for the quivering sensuality and the stony implacability at the heart of the horror, Matthew Lutton's 2016 production of Picnic at Hanging Rock for Malthouse should prove irresistible.

Lee Christofis

It is always refreshing when dance dares to be political. Lina Limosani is a fearless choreographer who calls her timely Dystopia, created for gifted final-year students at the Victorian College of the Arts, a '"genre mash-up" of tragi-comedy, contemporary dance and slapstick'. It is riotously black and impeccably paced as it moves towards a cyclone of rage launched on a bunch of wickedly ostentatious, born-to-rule fashionistas by a desperate underclass they have exploited for ages.

Driven by more personal forms of anger and ferocity is Tim Harbour's Filigree and Shadow, for The Australian Ballet, with an enveloping, post-Stockhausen score by Berlin-based group 48nord. Made up of dazzlingly articulated and ever-changing groupings, this is Harbour's most inventive and polished choreography to date.

Diana Doherty and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra's engrossing performance of the Concerto for oboe and small orchestra (1956) by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, was, intellectually and aesthetically, the most perfect performance of my year. Given that its 1956 world première was played by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and its Czech oboist, Jiří Tancibudek, who commissioned it, why is this masterpiece so rarely played in Australia?

And the most interesting work for 2016? A Midsummer Night's Dream by Liam Scarlett, Artist in Residence at The Royal Ballet, a co-production by Queensland Ballet and Royal New Zealand Ballet.

Alison Croggon

Malthouse Theatre's Antigone, directed by Adena Jacobs, was a fascinating experience: I'm not sure I moved for the duration of the show. Here the power of the state over the human body was brutally drawn. Featuring stellar performances and a stunning, physically palpable sound design from Jethro Woodward, it's one of the few times in the theatre that I've felt genuine terror creep up my spine.

The MTC's production of British playwright Simon Stephens's Birdland, a dark parable about celebrity and the neo-liberal self, was theatre at its most exhilarating. At the centre of Leticia Cáceres's bold, intelligent direction was an icily mercurial performance from Mark Leonard Winter as an amoral rock star, backed by a pitch-perfect ensemble cast.

Hugo Weaving in Endgame (Sydney Theatre Company, photograph by Lisa Tomasetti)

Brett Dean

The opening scene of Barrie Kosky's remarkable new staging of Handel's 1738 oratorio Saul at this year's Glyndebourne Festival signals an immediate intent. With its hyper-realistic, Ron Mueck-like severed Goliath's head in front of a crowded banquet table of vivid, painterly opulence, it cried out, 'Hi, my name's Barrie and you're never going to forget this show!' Surging between fantastically exuberant and touchingly intimate yet always entertaining, the stellar cast led by baritone Christopher Purves's biting beauty in the title role was matched for pulsating élan by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Ivor Bolton.

Wuppertal, Germany, is arguably best-known for its iconic suspension railway and for being the home of Pina Bausch's Dance Theatre. Since her death in 2009, the company has continued exclusively to honour the legacy of Bausch's extraordinary body of work – until September 2015, when the company commissioned three New Works. The first-ever work not conceived by Pina Bausch to be danced by the company was the enigmatically beautiful Somewhat still when seen from above by emerging British choreographer Theo Clinkard. Clinkard acknowledges the artistic provenance of the huge personalities he is working with, but in the subtlest and tenderest of ways coaxes new connections and possibilities of expression from them. It is fitting that, in a piece that is in some ways about the sheer hard work involved in the creative process, he also shines a telling light on the backstage crew of this great company.

Ian Dickson

The year may not be quite over, but it would be difficult to imagine that it will produce any theatre that could better the Sydney Theatre Company's magnificent Endgame (Arts Update). Andrew Upton's production, Nick Schlieper's set and lighting design and the supporting cast were all superb; but it was Hugo Weaving's outstanding Hamm that made this one for the ages.

It is good to see that there have been several successful Australian operas of late, and Fly Away Peter (Arts Update) is definitely one of them. Elliott Gyger and Pierce Wilcox have made a powerful lyrical work out of David Malouf's novella and they were well served by Imara Savage's production and a talented cast and crew.

The Greek Festival of Sydney's celebration of Mikis Theodorakis' ninetieth birthday took the form of a performance of his vast choral work Axion Esti that was stirring and deeply moving.

Julie Ewington

Robert MacPherson: A Painter's Reach (Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art): a decade after the last survey, this intelligent interpretation of MacPherson's inventive, rigorous, playful painting was sheer delight.

Reparative Aesthetics: Rosângela Rennó and Fiona Pardington (University of Sydney Gallery): a poignant pairing of artists from Brazil and New Zealand by art historian Susan Best, in a model of curatorial decisiveness.

Internationally, it was a line-call between Okwui Enwezor's pugnacious All the World's Futures at the Biennale of Venice and Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev's lyrical Istanbul Biennial, Tuzlu Su/Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms. Saltwater wins for its exquisite hardcover catalogue, a wonderful compendium of essays, texts and artists' drawings.

In 2016: 20th Biennale of Sydney (15 March–5 June 2016). Since 1973 the Biennale has made an incalculable contribution to Australian cultural life. The focus on the rich performative strands in contemporary art promises to be fresh and exciting.

Morag Fraser

In midwinter, Austrian bass-baritone Florian Boesch and Scottish pianist Malcolm Martineau performed Schubert's three great song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin, Schwanengesang, and Die Winterreise, over three consecutive nights, in perfect ensemble (Arts Update). It's late spring now, yet whole phrases, cadences, and crystalline variations still haunt me. It's Schubert, of course – his incomparable lieder etch so deeply. But this performance, not uncontroversial, was also indelible – and fresh. Over the three intense nights I learned much I thought I knew already – about music's way of distilling profound emotion. This was Schubert for a new generation. Unforgettable.

Equally memorable was Loin des hommes (Far from Men), David Oelhoffen's Algerian civil war film, based on Albert Camus's L'Hôte (The Guest). Viggo Mortensen's hypnotic performance had its perfect foil in Reda Kateb's role as his Arab prisoner. And the cinematography was breathtaking.

In 2016 I look forward to seeing (not live, alas) the Met's latest production of Berg's Lulu, with sets by the extraordinary William Kentridge.

Ian Bostridge, Dietrich Henschel and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Daniel Aulsebrook)

Andrew Fuhrmann

Dance Massive again provided a host of highlights, but among the many exciting festival premières it was Anouk van Dijk's Depth of Field that left the strongest impression. Lit by a perfect Melbourne sunset, this enthralling outdoor event brought something unexpected and joyful into the peak-hour world: a real, if momentary, urban transformation.

Heading back inside the theatre, I was dazzled by the wonderful Malthouse/STC quick-change production of Caryl Churchill's Love and Information. Nothing was wanting in director Kip Williams's interpretation of one of the great plays of the twenty-first century, which included riveting performances from the likes of Zahra Newman and Alison Whyte.

Finally, I was deeply moved by composer Elliott Gyger's adaption of Fly Away Peter, the David Malouf classic about World War I. With unstinting energy and imagination, Gyger has given powerful new form to the troubled lyricism of Malouf's tale of savagery and innocence.

And next year? I'm looking forward to seeing another classic Australian novel transformed for the stage – Picnic at Hanging Rock at Black Swan and Malthouse.

Colin Golvan

I loved The Tempest (Arts Update), produced by Bell Shakespeare, particularly its wonderful farewell speeches, in this case offered on behalf of the bard as well as the retiring director John Bell and presented with grace and beguiling charm – 'Let your indulgence set me free.' I also admired Love and Information by Caryl Churchill, which reminded all fortunate enough to see it of the great energy and excitement a live cast can bring to the telling of simple and yet occasionally majestic stories about ordinary lives.

As for music, garlands for the piano recital of Garrick Ohlsson at the Melbourne Recital Centre as part of the Great Performers Series. Ohlsson is a performer of interesting contrasts – a big man with a subtle touch. And a special bouquet for the Tord Gustavsen trio at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (Arts Update). Gustavsen captures with confiding intimacy the complex rhythms of his improvised music – otherwise described as 'the slow burn'.

Next year I am looking forward to being surprised and enthralled by a gem or two from somewhere along the magic Sturt Street corridor.

Fiona Gruber

When Katherine Mansfield was dying of tuberculosis, she visited Gurdjieff's controversial Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau; her desperate search for a cure forms one thread in the rich and complex world of Alma De Groen's play The Rivers of China (Arts Update), which also involves a futuristic plot where women have all the power, and where a man wakes up in hospital after a mysterious accident, convinced that he is Mansfield. The play, first seen in 1987, was finally revived at Melbourne's Theatre Works earlier this year by Don't Look Away.

Benjamin Britten's enormous, moving War Requiem with the MSO and tenor Ian Bostridge was profound and superb at Melbourne's Recital Centre in June (Arts Update).

In another of the city's temples of culture, the NGV, Heartlands and Headwaters, the magnificent exhibition of John Wolseley's meditations on wetlands and climate change, was a celebration of one of the country's greatest painters and an extraordinary bravura performance in the art of watercolour on a giant scale.

Patrick McCaughey

The Whitney Museum of American Art has transformed itself by moving, daringly, from its Marcel Breuer fastness on Madison Avenue to Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District at the foot of the Highline. Between the Hudson and the City, Renzo Piano has given them an astute and brilliant new museum. They opened with six floors of their collection, titled America Is Hard to See. The Whitney strives always to show American art as an extension and reflection of American life. They succeeded.

MoMA's Picasso Sculpture is the most original as well as the most comprehensive account of the Magus in three dimensions. He stopped and started in sculpture, but remained the alchemist turning base materials – wire, string, cardboard, scraps of wood, kitchen utensils, toys, wing nuts – into astonishing works of art.

Jan Senbergs's 2016 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria will surprise everyone.

Mark Leonard White in Birdland (Melbourne Theatre Company)

Brian McFarlane

Though there were several engagingly humane Australian films – Last Cab to Darwin and Holding the Man (Arts Update) among them – three British films stay most tenaciously with me. In Mr Turner, director Mike Leigh, taking leave of the contemporary world he has often compellingly surveyed, turns his gaze on the great nineteenth-century artist. Its Turneresque opening image, with Timothy Spall's Turner silhouetted on the horizon, suggests that we may never come to know him in full.

Enthralled by my recent first reading of Vera Brittain's heartfelt memoir, Testament of Youth, I was prepared to be dissatisfied with the new film version. But this screen account of a lost generation during and after World War I rendered its essential concerns – pacifism, feminism – with poignant acuity, and in Alicia Vikander's Vera, a great writer is fittingly memorialised.

The National Theatre's production of London Road has been made into a film, moving fluidly through the lives of those affected by the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich, 2006. This may seem unlikely material for a musical, but the way it makes music from the banalities of everyday anxieties is a breakthrough for the genre.

Primrose Potter

Of the many wonderful performances I have seen this year, these three really stood out in spades. The Australian String Quartet with Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey playing Mendelssohn's Cello Concerto at the Dunkeld Festival was absolutely stunning. Both the Quartet and Pieter Wispelwey, playing Guadagnini matched instruments (his was made in 1760), produced the most beautiful tone in a salon the perfect size for chamber playing. Wispelwey's musicality and playing is unmatched by any cellist I have ever heard, and over the last seventy-five years I have heard most of the famous cellists. It was an amazing performance.

Melbourne Opera's production of Donizetti's great opera Maria Stuarda (Arts Update) was a standout; it showed how beautiful the bel canto style of singing is. Two great international sopranos Rosamund Illing and Elena Xanthoudakis sang the roles of Elizabeth and Mary, Henry Choo was in fine tenor voice as Leicester. Hearing it in English added to the impact: the audience could understand the abuse the two queens hurled at each other in Act Two. The singing was of the highest standard, and the experienced maestro Richard Divall held it all together, with the orchestra playing better than ever before. It was an unforgettable performance, one that other opera companies could well try to match.

In The Australian Ballet's production of Frederick Ashton's The Dream, the dancing, costumes and sets were of the greatest beauty. It is a lovely ballet at the best of times, and this time it really shone. Chengwu Guo was Puck, with thrilling elevation and finesse; Oberon was danced by Kevin Jackson, who partnered Madeleine Eastoe as Titania. Their partnering is legendary, and as this was Madeleine's final ballet before retiring, it gave an extra lustre to their pas de deux. Frederick Ashton's choreography is as fresh and delightful as ever, and it was an electrifying and enormously satisfying performance by the best dancers.

John Rickard

The Australian Chamber Orchestra's Reflections on Gallipoli (Arts Update) program brought together the talents of Richard Tognetti, deviser Nigel Jamieson, and director Neil Armfield, drawing upon Australian, English, and Turkish music and combining stark photographic images of the horrific battlefield with moving readings by actors Yalin Ozucelik and Nathaniel Dean. Eschewing any nationalistic heroics, it was harrowing, yet, in the music of lament, still offered the salve of beauty.

The operatic event of the year for me was the Victorian Opera's stunning concert performance of Bellini's I Puritani (Arts Update), with conductor Richard Mills, Orchestra Victoria, and an excellent cast led by the superb duo of soprano Jessica Pratt and tenor Celso Andres Albelo Hernandez. Bel canto singing of this calibre is all too rare.

I look forward to hearing Pratt in the 2016 Victorian Opera production of Lucia di Lammermoor, the role which has established her reputation in Europe.

As for films, one could hardly go past David Oelhoffen's Far from Men, with marvellously matched performances from Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb. Set at the beginning of the Algerian war in a landscape of desolate beauty, it provides a lesson in the art of story-telling – unhurried, searching, cumulative in its effect.

Simon Rattle conducting the Australian World Orchestra, at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Peter Rose

Timidity among programmers has long deprived local audiences of the works of Anton Bruckner. Hats off to the Australian World Orchestra (in its third formation) for giving us the Eighth Symphony (Arts Update). Simon Rattle, though clearly ill like his wife, Magdalena Kožená (who withdrew after the Sydney concerts), led a shattering performance – proof, if we needed it, that this is one of the greatest of all symphonies.

Director David McVicar has done much to raise standards at Opera Australia in recent years. Sandwiched between his two new Mozarts came his elegant production of Gounod's Faust (Arts Update). I saw this in London eleven years ago, with the starriest of casts (Gheorghiu, Alagna, Terfel, Keenlyside, Koch), but the February opening night in Sydney was even better, with sensational performances from Michael Fabiano and Nicole Car as Faust and Marguerite.

The Melbourne Recital Centre has transformed musical life in Melbourne. Of the many fine pianists who have played in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Paul Lewis has made the deepest impression with a series of Schubert concerts, and, more recently, a Beethoven–Brahms program for Musica Viva. The incomparable Opus 111 sonata capped a performance of the greatest refinement.

Looking ahead, the Met's new Tristan und Isolde beckons in September, with the mighty Nina Stemme and Australian tenor Stuart Skelton singing the role of Tristan for the first time. In the coup of the year, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra will present these two great Wagnerians in a concert with excerpts from Tristan und Isolde in November 2016.

Dina Ross

2015 was the Year of Women, marked by superlative writing and mesmerising performances. First came a welcome revival at Red Stitch of Annie Baker's The Flick (Arts Update). Baker's pared-back script managed to be moving, funny, tender, bleak, and hopeful at the same time. Superlative performances by Ngaire Dawn Fair, Ben Prendergast, and Kevin Hofbauer, along with Nadia Tass's sure-footed direction, made this a welcome return season.

Stand-outs in MTC's Neon season of new, experimental Australian drama included Patricia Cornelius's visceral portrayal of brutalised women, SHIT and Elbow Room's We Get It. Here, writer Marcel Dorney and his feisty troupe of actresses used the framework of a crass TV game show to showcase the dark underbelly of stardom. Fast-paced, witty, and searingly raw, the play combined satire and bitter comedy to underpin the female struggle to reach the top in a man's world.

At Malthouse Theatre, Caryl Churchill's Love and Information tore across the stage at breakneck speed. A cast of eight embodied more than 100 characters in a series of random vignettes. And anyone who saw Maria Mercedes perform as Maria Callas in fortyfivedownstairs' Master Class (Arts Update) was treated to an acting class in masterful technique. Ladies, take a bow!

The Rabbits (Opera Australia/Barking Gecko Theatre Company, photograph by Jeff Busby)

Michael Shmith

The musical highlight of 2015 was the intense and rewarding Schubertiade with Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau at the Melbourne Recital Centre in early July. The performances of Die schöne Müllerin, Schwanengesang, and Die Winterreise were peerless, with immaculate singing and playing.

Later in the year, two operas caught my imagination. Stella, by G.W. Marshall-Hall, received its first full staging since 1912. Melbourne's Lyric Opera should be praised for exhuming this neglected and significant piece of urban romanticism. The Melbourne Festival should likewise be commended for its co-commissioning of The Rabbits (Arts Update), by composer Kate Miller-Heidke and librettist Lally Katz – a charming, lucid, and ultimately dark work inspired by Shaun Tan and John Marsden's children's book.

The Australian Youth Orchestra also shone brightly in 2015 with its concert of Debussy and Mahler under the expert tutelage of the English conductor Mark Elder.

In 2016? Der Ring, of course.

Michael Kieran Harvey performing at The Known World Bookshop, Ballarat

Doug Wallen

Australia gets more music festivals every year, and most of them suffer from an oversaturation of offerings. But two festivals in 2015 encouraged me to absorb live music as nourishment rather than distraction. Pitched as a 'festival of the ecstatic', the inaugural Supersense program spanned Melbourne's Arts Centre and Hamer Hall. In a matter of hours I got to see Marc Ribot's rambunctious finger-picking, Chris Abrahams's wraithlike piano layering, and Gurrumul's reworked gospel standards, among other highlights. More ambitious by comparison, Ballarat's Festival of Slow Music (Arts Update) spanned nine days and ranged from marathon all-night stands to child-friendly sets in museums and gardens. The programming was kaleidoscopic in genre and impressively international for a budding festival in regional Victoria.

As nice as it is to slow down, though, Melbourne synth-punk quartet Ausmuteants delivered my favourite performance of 2015 with a brashly accelerated set opening for Regurgitator at the Prince Bandroom.

My most anticipated tour of 2016 comes courtesy of US indie rock band Waxahatchee, an unfiltered emotional outlet for songwriter Katie Crutchfield.

Terri-ann White

It's a rare experience to attend an arts festival in an Australian capital city and be offered works from our geographical region animating the threads of tradition and innovation that often have a more pronounced tension in non-Western cultures. Darwin is most likely the only contender for such programming in their annual arts festival. Outstanding works at Darwin in 2015 under Andrew Ross's direction were Prison Songs, a stage work adapted from the SBS documentary about Berrimah Prison in Darwin, starring the peerless Ernie Dingo and Shellie Morris, full of humour and piercing pain. Cry Jailolo is an exquisite, eerily beautiful dance work by Indonesian choreographer Eko Supriyanto, working with untrained young men from a 'tropical paradise' community being ravaged by ecological degradation. It also travelled to Adelaide for the OzAsia festival. I was pleased to be able to attend a one-off performance, The Food of Love, by Indonesian singer and ethnomusicologist Ubiet with Brisbane-based musical wonders Topology (the festival's resident music group), involving song cycles from poems by, among others, Randolph Stow set to music by Robert Davidson.

Next year I am particularly looking forward to the first work by Force Majeure's new artistic director, Danielle Micich, a Perth choreographer I have admired for years.

Ryan Corr as Timothy Conigrave and Craig Stott as John Caleo in Holding the Man

Kim Williams

2015 was memorable for so many things that selection is painful. In January there was the sublime miniature Kiss & Cry at Carriageworks for the Sydney Festival, created by Jaco Van Dormael and Michèle Anne De Mey and the Charleroi Danses company. In this absorbing, wholly satisfying production we had a living fairy tale cum dream narrative. In a glorious original amalgam – which united video, the intimacy of a radio play, and a magic lantern show – a beautiful, fragile, exquisitely moving theatre piece unfurled before our eyes where the wonder of theatre, imagination and virtuosic execution by masterful performers united, as if alchemy truly lived.

Neil Armfield's film of Tommy Murphy's superb screenplay based on Timothy Conigrave's Holding the Man held me spellbound in laughter, tears, and heartfelt solidarity with the courage of the storytelling about the passionate romance between Conigrave and John Caleo. This was cinema to make one burst with pride on every level – performances, cinematography, editing, design, music, writing and, above all, consummate direction.

There were many remarkable music pleasures in this year, especially the recent Musica Viva recital by piano virtuoso Paul Lewis (a musician's musician) of a really demanding display program of Beethoven (Opus 109 and 111) and Brahms (Ballades, Opus 10 and Intermezzi opus 117). It was the type of deep, thoughtful rendition of a fine program that reminds one as to the necessity of live concert experience. As did Richard Tognetti's ACO Gallipoli program in April – mesmerisingly good.

In the next twelve months I intend to celebrate with Ensemble Offspring (and their dynamic artistic directors, Damien Ricketson and Claire Edwardes) their inspiring twenty-year commitment to contemporary music generally and to the music of this land especially. Bravi, bravissimi!

Jake Wilson

This year's best films demand to be seen several times over. George Miller's spectacular Mad Max: Fury Road (Arts Update) moves so fast that one viewing is hardly enough to register all the details of its intricately grotesque fantasy universe, imagined from the ground up by the most gifted of all Australian filmmakers. Hou Hsiao-hsien's enigmatic The Assassin is a very different kind of 'action' movie, but one that likewise reduces conventional exposition to a minimum, keeping us alert to the slightest breath of wind in between the rare moments of swift, decisive violence. Even after three viewings I would struggle to summarise the plot of Paul Thomas Anderson's shaggy-dog comedy-mystery Inherent Vice, based on the equally convoluted novel by Thomas Pynchon. But narrative is incidental to the film's pleasures, which centre on colour, framing, rhythm, and a cast of eccentrics led by Joaquin Phoenix as a perpetually stoned private eye.

In 2016, I'm especially looking forward to the return of Twin Peaks. A soap opera like no other, it has influenced practically all ambitious television made since.

Twenty-five years ago, Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy reimagined boldly the possibilities for Australian memoir. Modjeska recounts in her new memoir, Second Half First, how in her inaugural appearance at a writers' festival she was on a panel discussing autobiography with two established British writers, Victoria Glendinning and Andrew Motion. Poppy was written but not yet released. Feeling at a disadvantage following on from such accomplished performers, she rose with conviction to announce that 'here in Australia we were thinking about what biography might mean if we took as our subjects those who are not usually considered "worthy" of "A Life"'. She wondered how the inclusion of something of the biographer's own story might contribute to a deeper understanding of how 'a life became a narrative'. Glendinning patronisingly found the idea 'extraordinary'. 'We're not thinking about that in England,' she said.

Tim Winton's island home seethes and rings, whispers and beckons with sheer life. It tantalises through shreds of memories and phantom histories turned to stone or engraved in ocean-scored rocks and remote caves. Like William Blake's 'green and pleasant land', it is compromised but offers 'a World in a grain of sand / And a Heaven in a wild flower'. His isle, like Prospero's, is 'full of noises / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight ...' Before his youthful gaze, as he sat on a surfboard 'waiting for the next set', the natural world revealed itself, '... a sea-shore, now I saw it clearly, was a live system. And so was a creek, a coastal heath, a forest. Even a blunt dolerite cliff was somehow in motion, under power, subject to endless force. This experience of nature as 'somehow in motion' irresistibly recalls Wordsworth rowing the stolen boat on the lake when

a huge peak, black and huge
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me.

Kazuo Ishiguro recently sparked off a literary row about whether 'serious' writers should dabble in fantasy when he insisted rather too strongly that he was not writing fantasy in his latest novel The Buried Giant (2015). All those giants and pixies, knights and dragons were but a means to an end.

A strange controversy, considering a galaxy of 'serious' stars have been liberally using fantasy for decades. No one more than Salman Rushdie, who gave us a batch of Indian babies born with superpowers in Midnight's Children (1981), a subcontinental banshee of destruction in Shame (1983), angels and demons in 1988's The Satanic Verses (for which, as we all know, he paid a terrible price), and now a world of roistering jinn.

It is interesting to contrast Ishiguro's toe in the water of fantasy with Rushdie's triple somersault dive. On one side, Ingmar Bergman; on the other, Bollywood. Whereas Ishiguro offers an anaemic landscape with a feeble dragon and battles decided with one swing of a sword, Rushdie gives us colossal technicolour jinn riding on flying urns; giant snakes coiling round the Chrysler building; fire, smoke, and lightning; and a global war that endures for one thousand and one nights.

How dissimilar two books on the same topic can be: one expansive and apparently unconstrained by word limits, the other constrained and economical; one following a simple chronological narrative, the other an admirable adaptation of literary techniques of multi-layered story telling. Both are political books, but the politics are as different as the personalities of the authors. Stephen Kotkin is a professor at Princeton whose fame dates back to his study Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (1995), which argued that ideology needed to be taken more seriously by historians. It inspired an entire school of history writing. For those outside this school, Kotkin became notorious for his scoffing at the archival work of colleagues who had succumbed to the perversion of 'archival fetishism'. Old school leftists tut-tutted at his undisguised neo-liberalism, which saw Stalinism as a somewhat extreme version of the welfare state.

By contrast, Oleg Khlevniuk is a less divisive figure, at least in the West. He has no school, no chair at a prestigious university, no grand theory. A senior research fellow at the Russian State Archive and at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, he is the most accomplished historian of high politics under Stalin. Politically, he battles the rising neo-Stalinism in today's Russia, and he does so by disciplined presentation of evidence. Nobody knows the archives like this humble scholar who, despite his undisputed mastery of the sources, takes pains to acknowledge the work of those who came before him.

Since 1980, Victoria has become a natural Labor state. It has seen twenty-three federal and state elections in that time, and Labor has won seventeen of them. The Coalition has won just three state elections in thirty-five years, and a majority of Victoria's seats at just three of the last thirteen federal elections.

It is a stunning reversal of roles. For its first ninety years, Labor was camped almost permanently on the outer of Victorian politics, while the Liberals or Country Party occupied the government benches. Menzies, Bolte, Hamer, Fraser: the Liberal party was a broad church, but a successful one, which took care of the political middle ground while Labor focused more on internal and union warfare than on winning government. It is very different now. Since the long Liberal rule in Victoria ended in 1982, Labor in every state has been in government most of the time, and the Coalition in opposition. In Victoria, the last Coalition government survived just one term. Its Labor predecessor lasted for three terms and then suddenly lost power when everyone, including the Liberals, assumed it would win a fourth.

It was watching the empty buses leave in the dark outside the restaurant that did it. I was eating with my lover and my daughter on a June evening in Altona when I found myself being distracted by the rooms of light, quite empty, that floated behind my daughter's back. Every ten or fifteen minutes there would be another one heading off into the night, passengerless, to complete a huge orbit of Melbourne.

I went home and entered the bus route number in my computer. I discovered that seven orbital bus routes – the longest suburban ones in the country – were launched in Melbourne in 2009 to complement the existing radial spokes. The transport map of Melbourne, once a giant crooked asterisk, had become a web, at last allowing cross-town travel by public transport.

Strangers to Melbourne might do laps on the City Circle tram, or buy a ticket for the Melbourne Visitor Shuttle, or pop down to the Yarra to go on a river cruise. Instead, I opted to take a ride on one of these orbital routes.

First, some figures, to put things in perspective. The longest orbital route, the 901 from Frankston to the airport, clocks in at 114 kilometres. The journey from start to finish takes four hours. For some reason, the 903, from Altona to Mordialloc, which transcribes a massive, jagged arc around Melbourne's suburban sprawl, takes four and a quarter hours to complete eighty-six kilometres. This represents an average speed accomplishable, even by someone like me, on a bicycle.

Beth Yahp's beautifully crafted memoir of her ancestors, her parents, and herself is shaped around journeys criss-crossing the Malay Peninsula where her Siamese-speaking Eurasian mother and her Hakka Chinese father met and married in 1961. A photograph seems to have triggered the project – perhaps the lovely sepia cover shot of her parents on their honeymoon, sitting on a wall somewhere in Malaya before Independence. Yahp persuades her ageing parents to return home to Kuala Lumpur from Honolulu for a road trip around their country so that she can begin to decode their lives and, along the way, bring her own into focus. She illuminates a world where Malaysian politics are increasingly corrupt, where censorship is rife and activism dangerous. Most people keep their heads down, much as they do back home in Yahp's Sydney, where both sides of politics are ruthlessly turning back boats and controlling borders.

The Yahp family mantra, Eat First, Talk Later, acts as a kind of buffer for a more conservative generation preferring privacy and security to the unfamiliar literary excavations and exposés of contemporary memoir-making. Her mother, Mara, glares when her daughter keeps prodding her to tell her stories.

In an isolated hut in the countryside, a young woman wakes from a drug-induced sleep to discover that she is dressed in a nineteenth-century smock. She soon finds another young woman in the same condition, and both are forced to submit to the shaving of their heads. It is contemporary Australia: kookaburras cackle outside. Are they in a prison, or a religious cult, or – as one of their fellow inmates suggests – inside a reality television show? It emerges that the ten young women living in the camp are modern-day media criminals condemned for making public the sexual transgressions of prominent men – as the mistress of a politician, the sexual conduit for a football team's bonding, or the victims of harassment by important businessmen, coaches, or clergymen. One has suffered in the army, another been abused and abandoned on a cruise ship. Despite their shaven heads, lack of make-up, and strange costumes, they vaguely recognise each other from the media flurry.

Charlotte Wood takes a clever idea – the transformation of media and community responses to women's protests about (and sometimes willing participation in) sexual misbehaviour into retribution through physical humiliation and deprivation. She draws attention to the hypocrisy behind the fear of young women's sexuality, and the way that some public figures deny responsibility for 'that woman' and their own sexual misdemeanours. Yolanda and Verla, the two protagonists, must struggle to survive in the old shearers' quarters of a station in the outback. At the beginning of the novel, in summer, the place appears desolate, but by autumn they begin to find resources in themselves and in the countryside that give them hope.

Over the last year, Italian enigma Elena Ferrante has become one of the most passionately advocated literary sensations of our time. Enigma, because 'Elena Ferrante' is a pseudonym and no one other than her publisher knows her identity, Ferrante had published several novels before the Neapolitan series, but it is this cycle of four novels, culminating in The Story of the Lost Child (Storia della bambina perduta, 2014) that has made her international reputation.

Comparisons with the other great serialised novel of recent times, Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, are inevitable. As stylists, Knausgaard and Ferrante could not be more different. With My Struggle, Knausgaard eschews literary conventions such as linear story-telling and refined prose in pursuit of more immediate access to lived experience. In contrast, Ferrante dives so wildly headlong into her story that you wonder how she can possibly keep it up over 1,700 pages of prose. And yet there are affinities too: both are presumed to be works of autobiographical fiction, both chart the developing consciousness of a writer, and both pursue their subjects with an abandon that makes for thrilling literature.

Robyn Archer debated Peter Singer during the 2015 Melbourne Writers Festival; their topic was 'Is Funding the Arts Doing Good?'. This is an edited version of her paper.

I hear that in New York
At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway
A man stands every evening during the winter months
And gets beds for the homeless there
By appealing to passers-by

It won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation
But a few men have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

Don't put down the book on reading this, man.

A few people have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
But it won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation
                                                                   ('A Bed for the Night')

This poem, written by Bertolt Brecht around 1930 (and translated here by Georg Rapp), seems as hard-nosed as many of Peter Singer's arguments. I wish I could be as similarly hard-nosed. I'm not a sentimental person, and am rarely driven by emotion (passion and lust, yes, but not often emotion) and I love the often uncompromising dialectic of Brecht's poetry.

I believe that when the Melbourne philanthropist Julie Kantor supports the theatre company Somebody's Daughter, which exists solely to help women prisoners both during their incarceration and as they leave, she is doing good, through the arts. I am not hard-nosed enough to criticise this act of generosity because it does not stand up to the scrutiny of 'effective altruists'. One simply can't argue with them. Who will stand up and say in public that they do not believe that every life is of equal value? Who will say that not every child is equally deserving of life and a future? No one.

It is highly likely that if I gave due diligence to absolute rational thinking I would come to the conclusion that saving X number of lives and relieving X many years of suffering does more good than offering proven pathways to dignity and creativity for perhaps only twenty people with intellectual and physical impairments. But I am not hard-nosed enough to say that Back to Back Theatre is not deserving of philanthropic support. Somewhere in me, despite its irrationality, I cannot help but believe that the philanthropic funding of this company is doing good. Perhaps not as much good as the absolutism of effective altruism demands, but surely, relatively, good.

'Who will stand up and say in public that they do not believe that every life is of equal value?'

As a nightclub and country singer who matriculated with double maths, physics, and chem, and was subsequently invited to take Honours in Philosophy, I find much to enjoy in Peter's strictly statistical approach. Indeed, while reading Peter's new book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically, I have found myself taking up his argument – for instance at the Sydney hotel that encouraged me to give one dollar to UNICEF, or with the strapping, seemingly well-fed young man begging on the streets. There is much in Peter's arguments to make us think twice about 'charity'. But that does not seem to be persuading me in my brain and bones to cease wanting philanthropy for the arts.

When the Myer Foundation, the Thyne Reid Foundation, and the Harold Mitchell Foundation, and a company like Woodside support an arts company like Big hART, philanthropic contribution is doing good. For more than twenty years, this company has achieved an eighty-five per cent non-recidivist rate in young offenders, ex-addicts, who work in the company; it has given hope to farming families driven off their land and prone to suicide; it has given voice to communities of indigenous Australians, many of whom live in Third World conditions.

Although I am persuaded by Peter's arguments and the compelling nature of his writings, I can't seem to play the numbers game and decide that this kind of philanthropy should be stopped. Kindness by numbers is somehow not working for me. As I am not one who has ever craved happiness – abiding instead by the Brechtian adage 'If all chase after happiness, happiness comes in last' – that is not a motive for one who grabs fleeting moments of happiness as they occur, unbidden, at any moment.

'When ... a company like Woodside support(s) an arts company like Big hART, philanthropic contribution is doing good'

One of the difficulties I have with Peter's position on the arts is that he concentrates on huge institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Lincoln Centre. He gives the impression all arts organisations are similarly well-heeled. It is a dangerously narrow (and New York-centric) view and it reinforces in the public mind an often mistaken view of what the arts are. I have a certain amount of sympathy for the idea that the enormous sums spent on ever more voracious collecting by major art museums should be curbed in the interests of alleviating poverty. But even then, in the most accomplished spheres of the arts, I wonder if it really is true that the presence of art is the sign of a civil society. Certainly, my colleagues at Soul of Europe believe this – that the arts have a vital role to play in the harmonising of divided communities. But there are contraries to this too. It was George Steiner, in his opening Edinburgh Festival address many years ago, who pointed out that we have seen clearly how certain leaders, peoples, can watch art one night and then go out and conduct acts of unspeakable barbarity the next.

Steiner was suggesting there is nothing noble per se about the arts as a civilising influence. And indeed in the preparation of this paper, I seriously wondered whether the civil-society argument might just be all self-justifying bullshit. Suddenly, my other love, my cultural pastime, AFL football, shone a light on our society. One week I was moved by the respect shown for my team, the Adelaide Crows, upon the demise of our coach – the silences of tens of thousands of fans, rival teams' footballers arm in arm at the end of matches, the biggest butchest Australian men alive, weeping openly on the field and texting things like ' I fell in love with him as a bloke'. One week later I saw the fans and the public involved in an ugly skirmish about racism.

This showed me what a knife edge we are on when it comes to civil society, and how quickly we might descend into a kind of barbarity if we started to skimp on the arts – that safest place for a dangerous conversation, the awkward grey place of negotiating between the radio shock jock and rancid hack's black and white. Or, as the playwright David Edgar put it in 2012, defending the essential role of the arts in democracy as an avenue of dissent: 'Isn't the crucial role of art to challenge the way society is run?' He quoted Tessa Jowell's paper which defined the arts' primary purpose: 'to communicate perceptions about the human condition that can't be communicated in any other way.'

I need to ask, 'Do effective altruists listen to music – even just at home?' If not, what kind of society are they creating? And if so, they need to be aware that the withdrawal of philanthropy from the arts will certainly reduce musical output of all kinds. For without philanthropy, much art, both of the rarefied kind and art which has a social or political agenda, will disappear.

'I need to ask, ''Do effective altruists listen to music – even just at home?'''

Most importantly, Peter's arguments for effective altruism, much like fundamental religious arguments, offer us no way out. The richness of statistical evidence he presents in The Most Good You Can Do makes it clear that if you want to save more lives and alleviate more suffering, if you want your philanthropic efforts to be as effective as possible, then you have to do the due diligence and must research at great length where you want your money to go. Your children, your locale, your country are no more worthy of your philanthropy than any other children, or animals, in any other part of the world. To be an effective altruist, you will not decide by heart or spontaneity or on the basis of being moved by particular stories or conditions. If you do so, you are guilty of being irrational and unhelpful. Contributing to expensive works of art for major museums or hugely pricey instruments for orchestras doesn't stack up vis-à-vis saving lives and alleviating suffering, or possibly contributing to research that will lessen the potential for the destruction of all humanity when a big meteor hits once every 100,000 years. Rationality and logic are pre-eminent.

We don't know what effective altruism's positioning is with regard to those arts companies (and there are a vast number of them) that are devoted to social change; they are never mentioned in the literature. I suspect that, statistically, the good they do doesn't stack up, in the effective altruism analysis, against what you could do with your philanthropic contributions. No matter how excellent you think these artists are, or how much you want to help them to do their work, they will not rate statistically as fitting places to put your money – if you seriously want to do the most good you can. It's all about the stats, and it's all about making logical decisions.

But, what if rationality and logic are not the things? There are many different opinions about truth. Some declare that it is the god they believe in. Effective altruists swear by their belief in logic. But what if we are more in tune with the universe when we act spontaneously and with a degree of irrationality? What if, for instance, intuition or music is the truth we should look to, rather than rationality and logical behaviour.

'What if rationality and logic are not the things?'

Beethoven claimed: 'Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend.' He also said: 'Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.' If that is the case, would we not be equally as hard-nosed as the effective altruists by advocating the creation and experience of music instead of saving lives and alleviating suffering?

Despite the fact that effective altruism does not rate things like justice and beauty, if we listen to that philosopher instead of this one, we would most certainly say that philanthropic support of the arts – at very least music – is doing a power of good.

Perhaps the poet–playwright Brecht expressed this Singer's song more effectively than the philosopher–statistician himself:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should think about the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that's where we begin.
You lot, who bank on your desires and our disgust
Should learn for all time how the world is run:
Whatever lies you tell, however much you twist
Food is the first thing. Morals follow on
So first make sure that those who now are starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving.

     What keeps mankind alive?
     What keeps mankind alive?
     The fact that millions
     Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed
     Mankind can keep alive, thanks to its brilliance
     In keeping its humanity repressed,
     For once you must try not to shirk the facts:
     Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.
                                                            (Brecht/Weill, translated by John Willett)

Susan Midalia's Feet to the Stars references Sylvia Plath's poem 'You're', in which Plath addresses her unborn child: 'Clownlike, happiest on your hands, / Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, / Gilled like a fish ...' This clever title foreshadows Midalia's exploration of children in the family dynamic and the use of intertextuality, which are integral to her short stories.

This is Midalia's third book of short stories. In Feet to the Stars, joy and ambivalence mingle in stories that reference the filial (often mother–daughter) relationship. The emphasis on propagation is illustrated by the number of characters who are childless or have miscarried and is further complicated by the question of whether the drive to produce children might be, 'An ego thing. You know, just wanting to replicate your own miserable life.'  Women in 'The Inner Life' and 'Working It Out' have miscarried; in 'Oranges', the baby is 'failing to thrive'; in 'The Hook' and 'A Blast of a Poem', the protagonists mourn the absence of a child in their lives:

We kept on trying. We kept on talking. It'll happen soon. Don't worry. We've got plenty of time. No earthly reason. Just relax, our friends began to chorus, the ones with fuzzy-haired gurgling babies and dimpled toddlers ... Relax was what my GP said as well, what the expert on the radio said. I tried different kinds of herbal tea and St. John's Wort, also known as chase-devil.

For the most part, we move among books with ease, passing from one writer's prose to another without having to adjust the frequency of our inner ear. We detect shifts in style and sensibility, sure, but as readers we open ourselves to such a wide harmonic range that, should multiple books arrive on our lap with the authors' names deleted, we could segue from page to page without stumbling over minor variations.

Then there are those other writers, the ones with idiolects so distinct that their sentences startle us. Think of Nadine Gordimer, Shirley Hazzard, Clarice Lispector, or Janette Turner Hospital. We find ourselves seeking such writers precisely because of the temperament that makes their pages distinct. The first or even third encounter with their work can feel like a jolt, but as readers we often cling to our favourite writers precisely because of their differences. In this way, the taste and sensation of a book remains with us long after we forget the marriage plot or how the detective discovers whodunit.

In much contemporary fiction, point of view works like wallpaper to which we grow accustomed, usually within the first paragraph. We follow the first-person narrative, convinced that this story, told at this time, is absolutely necessary. And even if we can't find those notes from our literature class that remind us how to define the intricacies of the third person, we recognise them when we see them.

In this beautifully crafted novel, two parallel stories merge. Chapters alternate between Ellis, a young woman living in Sydney in the 1960s, and Dove, a thirty-eight-year-old woman in the present day. As the novel begins, Ellis is contemplating leaving her husband and taking her baby son with her; Dove is mourning the death of her adoptive mother – and writing a novel about Ellis. Dove's first chapter describes how reading Wuthering Heights aloud to her dying mother resulted in her finding a story of her own to write, and she is now 'firmly trapped within it'. In this way Adelaide subtly introduces the idea of writing as a work of mourning. Admirers of her previous novel, The Household Guide to Dying (2008), will be reminded of how well she deals with dying and death in the midst of everyday life.

The theme of everyday life as women have traditionally experienced it, a life of household caring and cooking and cleaning, is central to Ellis's story of the 1960s. Unexpectedly, this traditional feminine role feeds into her later success in the world of paid work – as editor of a mainstream women's magazine, which gives this novel its title. The Women's Pages, known as Pages, is strongly reminiscent of the Australian Women's Weekly, and in her character-building encounter with its bullying patriarch of a publisher, the heroine's experience recalls the depiction of Ita Buttrose confronting the Packers, father and son, in the television mini-series Paper Giants (2011).

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

I always felt I had urgent news to deliver. I wanted to do that more than anything else.

ARE YOU A VIVID DREAMER?

'Knowledge', asserts Peter Doherty, quoting Francis Bacon, 'is power'. Since 1996, having demonstrated his outstanding Nobel Prize contribution to the discovery of the nature of cellular immune defence and continuing research on viruses and immunity, this famous medical veterinarian has produced four books to enlighten a general audience on such matters as pandemics, hot air, birds, and his own personal saga, The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize (2006). Now he sets out to discuss the realities and challenges that face us – homo sapiens – from anthropogenic climate change and to show how our intelligent response to knowledge can influence the future of our planet.

This is a powerful and important book. Doherty, in his amiable conversational style, attempts to bring the forces of history, scientific enquiry and example, and his own considered understanding to educate the reader about the nature of science and the potentially deadly conflict we face between 'the new knowledge based in science' and 'the established powers' of money, vested interests, and global conglomerates. To these he adds the influence of advertising, the persistence of unexamined scepticism, narrow political vision, fraud, the greed of rampant consumerism, and community indifference and ignorance. In his view, not only are the established powers 'doing their utmost to block real progress and discredit the science: they seem to be winning'. But as Doherty contends, 'You don't have to be a scientist to know that we are all dependent on the good health of one small planet and that, ultimately, we will all share the same fate if we fail to use our power in ways that protect the benign environmental envelope and fragile atmosphere that is necessary to sustain life.'

On his first day in Australia's foreign service in 1961, Stephen FitzGerald was told to learn the language of the enemy: 'a country we have no diplomatic relations with, which our government denounces as an aggressor, instigator of subversion in Southeast Asia and major threat to Australia.' He took on the assignment with apprehension. China was completely foreign to him; he had never met anyone who spoke Mandarin. Over the next five decades he became one of the key players in Australia's relations with Asia, working as Australia's first ambassador to China under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, as an academic and adviser, and as a businessman and public intellectual. In his memoir, Comrade Ambassador: Whitlam's Beijing Envoy, FitzGerald weaves his personal journey into the narrative of the nation: how Australia moved from an era of insularity and racial exclusiveness to accept and embrace its place in Asia. He describes this extraordinary change as 'a kind of Australian "Enlightenment"'.

FitzGerald's story is also bound to the tumultuous events of modern Chinese history. He witnessed the 'anarchic madness and social breakdown' of the Cultural Revolution in 1968, and recalls the sense of possibility that followed the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976 and the 'brave new Chinese world of Deng Xiaoping'. He also describes encounters with key political figures such as the ageing Mao Zedong, the masterful Zhou Enlai, and the exiled Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mei-ling.

Studies in the early history of Australian democracy have undergone a remarkable regeneration over the past decade. Since New South Wales's sesquicentenary of responsible government in 2006, books by Peter Cochrane and Terry Irving, and essays by Paul Pickering, Andrew Messner, and Sean Scalmer, have overhauled prevailing interpretations of the 1840s and 1850s, which took colonial democracy to be a formality delivered by external factors, and emphasised the local impetus to this achievement. The energy of popular movements has been brought to life, while attention to the intellectual influences of popular constitutionalism and Chartism has illuminated a period of immense political creativity.

Benjamin T. Jones's début monograph, Republicanism and Responsible Government, continues this revision process. He adds two important perspectives to the story. First, colonial Australia's democratic experience, he contends, is better understood by emphasising a common political culture that was shared with colonial Canada. Second, in describing that common culture a new protagonist is introduced – 'civic-republicanism'. Jones's central thesis is that historians have over-emphasised the influence of liberalism and ideas of individual rights in explaining the formation of Canadian and Australian democratic institutions. Instead, he argues, collectivism, civic virtue, and duty, aversion to corruption and promoting the common good – ideals associated with the creed of 'civic-republicanism' – played an equal if not greater role.

'Money is like poetry because both involve learning to communicate in a compressed language that packs a lot of meaning and consequence into the minimum semantic space.'  This comparison, coming from one of today's most strident critics of the capitalist system, British novelist John Lanchester, is just one of the many delights and surprises John Plender provides in this fascinating and widely researched book, which he describes as 'a probe around the grumbling bowels of the capitalist system'. Elsewhere we learn that Marx was a 'day-trader', financed largely by factory-owner and fox hunter Engels, and enjoy a potted biography of the charmingly named rogue English MP Nicholas If-Jesus-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon.

Plender has given us a thematic primer in economic thought, combined with a rich compendium of what famous people have said about economics, business, and various manifestations of the profit motive. Criticisms of the pursuit of financial gain date back to Plato and the Old Testament, and caricatures of business people to Aristo-phanes and Petronius. Many leading figures in the Western canon have joined in, but despite the well-known tendency of artists to place themselves above the grubby marketplace, a large number of the giants of our culture were also involved in business – or at least gainfully employed – including Chaucer, Cervantes, Trollope, Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Gauguin, and Kafka. Many turned their art itself into a successful business, notably Shakespeare, Pope, Rubens, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, of course, Picasso.

It is all Vladimir Putin's fault. Two years after the crisis in Ukraine erupted, the prevailing view in Europe, the United States, and Australia remains that responsibility for the conflict there – including the shooting down of flight MH17 – lies with Russia's president. This, the argument goes, is all part of Putin's plan to restore Russia's dominance of its region to the borders of the former USSR and beyond.

This interpretation is so widely accepted that it comes as something of a shock to realise that Richard Sakwa's argument is almost diametrically opposed. Sakwa argues that the Ukraine crisis – rather than being the product of malevolent Russian ambition – began as a reaction to an expansionary surge by the European Union and NATO, orchestrated by Washington and aimed at expunging Russian influence from its borderlands. Why should Australians care? For one thing, impelled partly by the MH17 disaster, Canberra has bought into the Ukrainian conflict; we opened an embassy in Kiev and provide non-lethal military aid to the Ukrainian army. More broadly, Sakwa's book is a salutary challenge to the very basis of Australian foreign policy: the principle that Washington is always right.

Sakwa's analysis opens with the point that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been torn between two concepts of nationality. One seeks to 're-establish' a Ukrainian-speaking, culturally uniform, European country, purged of Russian influence. Sakwa dubs it this 'monist' nationalism – monism being a 'doctrine that only one being exists'. Monism finds its expression in the 'Orange' strand of Ukrainian politics: Ukrainian-speaking, strong in the west of the country, looking to Europe and the United States, and taking its colour from the 2004 'Orange Revolution' which brought the monist President Viktor Yushchenko to power. Sakwa believes the rival concept of nationality to be more accommodating: it envisages a 'pluralist' Ukraine, 'home to many disparate peoples' but acknowledging Russian influence and interests. This 'pluralist' ideal finds expression in the 'Blue' strand of Ukrainian politics: strong in the east, Russian-speaking, and leaning culturally and politically towards Moscow.

Our fourth 'Poem of the Week' is ‘Outsider Pastoral’ by Brendan Ryan. ABR's Poetry Editor, Lisa Gorton, introduces Brendan  who then discusses and reads his poem.

Outsider Pastoral

Three regulars laugh at their own jokes
sip beers without getting their lips wet.
Hunched shoulders, flannelettes,
two could be mountain men –
quiet, loyal, large, who probably
begin each day with a joint,
work at the abattoir, or swivelling
the Stop/Go sign, whatever they can get.
The small woman between them
has a face stretched by experience.
She knows where the good deer are,
slags off city hunters with their high-powered rifles
wouldn't have a clue how to butcher a beast.
She drinks J.D. The two nod, agree.
On the wall, a poster lists
fifteen ways a beer is better than a woman.

Mostly, they ignore me, are used to
tourists, can keep an eye on me
while watching the trots, shelves of spirits.
Too neat, too quiet, probably votes Green.
I'm just an outsider nursing his beer
who reeks of places anywhere but here.
When I worked in London pubs, there were men
you could set your watch to by the time
they arrived, emptied two pints, turned
with their briefcase for the Tube.

Men who had no need for conversation –
the day was in their heads. All that they had
they would give a good talking to,
eyeing off their reflections in mirrors
and brass railings, smoking John Player
when smoking was still allowed.

The woman behind the bar refills my pot
leans on the taps, chats to the mountain men.
The grins are quick and ready.
The small woman's voice rises
before they disappear to the beer garden.
The unease of remaining begins.
One more pot and the glances will extend
into questions.
Where are you from? What are you doing?
Growing up in the country, I learned
there is a line running like a fuse
between here and away,
between the jokes accepted
and the contentions that hold sway.
Is it better to drink with the locals
or rest your foot on the rail bristling
with accusations?
Where is the man who stuck up the poster?
The trio returns, eyes glazed, smiling.

Brendan Ryan grew up on a dairy farm at Panmure in Victoria. His poetry, reviews, and essays have been published in literary journals and newspapers. He has had poems published in The Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc). His second collection of poetry, A Paddock in his Head, was shortlisted for the 2008 ACT Poetry Prize. His most recent collection of poetry, Travelling Through the Family (Hunter Publishers), was published in 2012 and was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Awards. He lives in Geelong, where he teaches English at a secondary college.

Translation is all about choice: which authors will be attractive to the target audience? Which texts by those authors will be of interest? Which aspects of those texts should be emphasised? How can ambiguities in the original be preserved or resolved? What relative weight should be given to formal and semantic elements? Historically, the translation of Russian literature into English has often focused not only on its literariness, but at least as much on its potential contribution to the anthropological, social, or political understanding of Russia and the Russians. Stylistic experimentation and complexity have sometimes been obscured in the interests of a clear message. The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry skilfully avoids these pitfalls. It is an eminently readable book which opens a real window on to Russian verse for the reader of English. While due acknowledgment is made of the impact of censorship, persecution, and the burden of everyday life on Russian poetry and the lives of Russian poets, the collection's clear focus is on celebrating Russian poetry as a literary form.

Yet what the three editors have set out to give us is not literary history, but the experience of Russian poetry as a living organism in English. Like poetry itself, the book is not neat. Poets are not included or excluded simply on the grounds of their historical significance; some are left out because there are no good translations. Mostly the poems are translated into standard English, but some are given in Hugh MacDiarmid's lively Scots. Some poems are rendered more than once. A few are not translations at all, but original English works on Russian themes. The individual poets are each given informative, engaging, and slightly quirky introductions.

All writers need good bookshelves, but the poet, perhaps more than any other writer, is charged with the involuntary dispensation and relentless accumulation of reading material. This is partly due to the proclivities of the producers and partly due to the characteristics of the form itself. As the notable cultural critic Pierre Bourdieu remarked, poetry's effects derive from games of suspense and surprise, from the consecrated betrayal of expectations, and from the gratifying frustration provoked by archaism, preciosity, lexicological or syntactic dissonances, the destruction of stereotyped sounds or meaning sequences, ready-made formulae, idées reçues, and commonplaces.

It makes sense then that poetry, with its emphasis on heterogeneity and proliferation, should be the form that disseminates its products through the kaleidoscopic auspices of an array of media. So we have poetry in book form, as live performance, painted, plastered, and magic-markered across buildings, walls, and doors, embedded in the human epidermis, filmed, screened, and published online. We put it up in neon lights, post it on the sides of buses and trains, encode it into the DNA of micro-organisms, type it and print it and photocopy the pages to be folded and stapled haphazardly in the middle. We do this because, unlike the purveyors of other cultural objects, the poet has recipients rather than customers and is thus freed from the requirement of 'the minimal conditions of economic independence'.

Halfway through her first full-length collection, Babel Fish, Jillian Pattinson quotes Borges's famous argument: 'Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.' Her whole book does its best to embody this idea.

As its title 'Waterline' implies, the first group of poems here is loosely unified by water references, from the semi-scientific language of 'Communion' through to the T.S. Eliot-influenced poems, 'Ambiguities' and 'Estuary'. 'Estuary' elaborates a 'death by water', comparable to Virginia Woolf's suicide.

WHEN DID YOU FIRST WRITE FOR ABR?

The first thing I ever wrote for ABR was published early in 1985; it was a review of Helen Garner's The Children's Bach. My association with ABR has lasted much longer than any of my romantic entanglements.

WHICH CRITICS MOST IMPRESS YOU?

The best thing I can do here is quote lines of criticism that I've never forgotten. Terry Eagleton on Wuthering Heights: 'the institution of the family is founded upon a potentially anarchic force – sexual desire itself – which it must nevertheless strictly regulate.' This is a bit of insight that can be helpfully applied not only to Wuthering Heights but to most fiction, films, and theatre, to say nothing of daily life.

Helen Garner on Sally Potter's film Orlando, referring to the moment when the naked Tilda Swinton calmly looks straight back at the camera: 'This was a very special moment, for me. I heard the clank of loosening chains' – the best comment I've seen on the subversion of the male gaze. Katherine Mansfield on E.M. Forster: 'Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. See this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.'

Christopher Hitchens was an exceptional literary critic, of the old school. As with Hitchens, I am in awe of some of James Wood's insights, but the many vast and unspoken assumptions in his work that are founded on his unexamined Oxbridge-white-male privilege drive me bonkers. My favourite contempor-ary Australian critics are Delia Falconer and Felicity Plunkett for literature, and Alison Croggon and John McCallum for theatre. J.M. Coetzee, not surprisingly, is a superb literary critic. Clive James was the first and, I think, still the best real TV critic. And the New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross is always wonderful to read, even when you don't know what he's talking about.

Orry George Kelly – the Oscar-winning costume designer professionally known as Orry-Kelly – was one of the many Australians who have made it big in Hollywood. He is lucky enough to have been rediscovered by one of our major filmmakers, Gillian Armstrong. Kelly's name and story are now well known, thanks to Armstrong's recent documentary, and so is the brilliant title of his previously unpublished memoir, Women I've Undressed, which Armstrong adapted for her own enticing title, Women He's Undressed.

One of the most interesting stories surrounding the making of Women He's Undressed was the finding of this long-lost manuscript. Scholars interested in Kelly knew he had written a memoir, and it was rumoured that a copy had made its way to the family in Australia. But it took someone of the heft of Armstrong to unearth it (inside a pillowcase in the cupboard of a relative in rural New South Wales). Another was found in an unmarked box in Warner Bros' Los Angeles archives.

Philippe de Montebello was Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for thirty-one years. The astonishing length of his tenure is matched by the brilliance of his reign. Every part of the museum's forty-plus acres of exhibition space was renewed or transformed during those years, from classical antiquity to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Not a tatty corner or a tired old gallery remained after de Montebello swept through his empire of art on Fifth Avenue. Eighty-four thousand objects flowed into the already capacious collections. The apex of these acquisitions was Duccio's Madonna and Child, purchased for US$45 million or thereabouts (the Met is always cagey about what it actually pays for an object). It was the largest amount the museum has spent on any object in its 145-year history. De Montebello's response to the Duccio forms one of the better passages in Rendez-vous with Art:

what drove me to buy the Duccio was the fact that for close to an hour I did hold it in my hands, that I did turn it around, looking at the back, sensing its weight, measuring its thickness. It had a corporeal reality that was almost, to use a paradox, mystical.

I'm back, you bastards.' Jocelyn Moorhouse announces her return to the screen after eighteen years as vehemently as does her lead character, Tilly Dunnage, when she arrives in the one-horse outback town of Dungatar. The bus moves through a brown sea of wheat beautifully and cinematically, and when Tilly (Kate Winslet) steps down from the bus, she may carry a sewing machine instead of a six-shooter, but the intent is clear: she has brought Hollywood with her.

The notion of a golden age of television news followed by a relentless decline in standards and values is challenged by Charles L. Ponce de Leon, who argues that television news has always catered to public preferences. Ponce de Leon gives a solid overview and interpretation of the half century or so in which television news was the dominant information medium for Americans. He covers major events that have changed television journalism: the McCarthy hearings, Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations and terrorism, news consultants and tabloid television, the challenge to the big three players from CNN, then Fox, and, finally, the internet revolution which has ended television's reign as the major provider of news.

Curiosities abound. Many in the established medium of radio had misgivings about embryonic television news, especially when 'visualisation' became an early priority of newsrooms. Often with little means of actually visualising, they would resort to such devices as models or using toy soldiers to describe the Korean War. 'Anchorman' was a label made up by Walter Cronkite's boss during the 1952 Chicago political conventions, when he had to provide a base and continuity to diverse production inputs. The term later spread to newsreaders in general. (Cronkite's famous nightly sign off gives the book its title.)

Why is it that some recipe books fill you with enthusiasm to fire up the stove the instant you open them while others remain on the shelf, consulted rather than cooked from? Is it the text, the photographs, the design, or because they come from the pen of a trusted cook? In the case of The Essence of French Cooking and The Best of Gretta Anna with Martin Teplitzky, it is a combination of all these qualities, the most important being the sure hand of the author, which instils confidence that your efforts will be rewarded and time not wasted.

Michel Roux is one of the most famous French-born chefs working in England. With his brother Albert, he co-founded two multi-Michelin-starred restaurants – Le Gavroche (London, 1967) and The Waterside Inn (Berkshire, 1972) – both of which continue today, run by Michel (son of Albert) and Alain (son of Michel) respectively. In addition to creating restaurants, Michel Sr has published several cookery books, including Michel Roux: The Collection. Roux's cooking is firmly rooted in the classic French tradition, and the recipes reflect this rich heritage and training. As expected from a chef of this calibre, Roux enhances classic dishes with his own variations and twists.

On 10 June 1838, eleven men – ten whites and an African – slaughtered about thirty indigenous people at Myall Creek in northern New South Wales. The victims were hacked down with swords, and the killers returned a few days later to dismember and burn the bodies. The existence and interpretation of events like this have been deeply controversial since the publication of Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002). In part, what is at stake is the reliability of memory – not merely in the sense that individuals' memories are fallible, but also in the wider sense that public memories are contested. Public memory can be informed by historical and archeological scholarship, but at its core are personal memories and family stories, verbal traditions, artistic representations, and myth-making.

Public memories can be distorted or manufactured for political ends. In their contribution to Historical Justice and Memory, Elazar Barkan and Belma Bećirbašić detail extraordinary examples of memory divergence and corruption in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The corruption of memory has dire consequences for reconciliation as all sides, unwilling or unable to respect their opponents' understanding of the past, keep revisiting the same events from radically opposed perspectives, often with violent intent.

All Fall Down, set in 1980s Queensland, chronicles the direct and indirect links between officials and local criminals exposed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry (1987–89). It is the last volume in a trilogy that largely focuses on police corruption between the 1940s and 1980s, but there is also some discussion of the cronyism, misuse of powers, and corruption within the Country Party (later National Party), which dominated Queensland politics from 1957 to 1989. Matthew Condon has constructed an entertaining and sometimes moving series of shifting narratives about crooked cops, honest cops, and dubious characters in the 'Deep North'.

The strength of Condon's work is his fascination with the people he is researching. He has some interesting characters to work with. Condon is very effective at highlighting the dilemmas facing police officers who refused to take bribes or to accept a policy of 'going slow' in the investigation of crime when it suited forces within the police department. The reader is given a clear idea of how brave it was for these men and women to fight against the system. Perhaps surprisingly, the unambiguous criminals who appear in the text – the Brisbane vice barons and the officials they bribed – come across as boring and colourless, though undoubtedly ruthless. These shadowy underworld figures probably could not believe their luck at being in the right place at the right time.

In 1971, the Boston Women's Health Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves, which became an international phenomenon and was translated into twenty-nine languages. For second wave feminists, taking control of their lives and their bodies was a basic principle. The book provided information related to sexuality, birth control, abortion, pregnancy and childbirth, violence and abuse, and menopause. Only one chapter was devoted to issues around growing older.

When these women moved into the second half of their lives, they began to question the notion that incapacity comes inevitably with ageing. In 1987 the Collective published the first edition of The New Ourselves, Growing Older: Women Aging with Knowledge and Power, which encouraged readers to resist the fear of ageing. The information was tailored to the needs of baby boomers, with attention to the lack of clinical studies on female ageing, HIV and safe sex, cosmetic surgery and breast cancer, the reform of the medical care system, as well as managing finances and housing. Integral to the book was the understanding that when it comes to growing older, the personal and the political are irrevocably linked. The members of the Collective were part of that movement of women who fought for their own equality and in the process created a world-wide revolution. They changed the lives of all women – and men – who came after them, inspiring others to work for feminism and human rights.

21 Days: An Odyssey

Our survey of neglected novels published in the Fiction issue (September 2015) has attracted much attention. Peter Rose, lauding Rodney Hall's novel Captivity Captive (1988), wrote: 'The book might have been written in a day – one inspired day.' Well, not quite. Rodney Hall, in an email, told our Editor that Captivity Captive was written in twenty-one days. It seems he barely revised the manuscript before it was published. 'It came out like that,' Hall wrote. Would that all authors were so fortunate.

Rodney Hall, Captivity Captive (Farrar Straus Giroux, first edition, 1988)

Coincidentally, during an interview with Kevin Rabalais at the Melbourne Writers Festival, David Malouf remarked that An Imaginary Life – the novel many critics rate as his finest – was also written in twenty-one days.

Vale Veronica Brady

Peter Rose quoted from Veronica Brady's review of Captivity Captive. Days later we learned of her death at the age of eighty-six. Veronica Brady was a singular presence in Australian letters: a nun who was also a distinguished writer, an authority on the works of Patrick White and Judith Wright, a professor of literature at the University of Western Australia, and a prominent spokesperson in the Aboriginal land rights movement. She wrote for ABR thirty times, from our third issue in August 1978 until 1999.

Strehlow's neglected classic

T.G.H Strehlow, Journey to Horseshoe Bend (Giramondo Publishing)

It's not just major novels that deserve to be reissued. Countless superb Australian histories and biographies and memoirs are unavailable. One of them is Journey to Horseshoe Bend, by T.G.H. Strehlow. Journey, which was published in 1969, has been unavailable for almost forty years. Now it appears in Giramondo Classic Reprints ($26.95 pb), with an afterword by Philip Jones. Ivor Indyk, head of Giramondo Publishing, told Advances: 'Our intention is to use the series to reprint outstanding works that would otherwise go under the radar (hence the Strehlow, which is extraordinary and overlooked).'

Extraordinary the book certainly is. The scene when the elderly and dropsical Carl Strehlow departs from Hermannsburg in the Northern Territory and the 'dark friends' he has long cared for farewell him with an Aranda version of a Lutheran chorale is profoundly stirring, as is the adjuration from 'old Margaret' to Strehlow's departing son, Theo, then fourteen: 'You are not just a white boy, you are one of us ... No other white child born here has ever returned to us, but you must come back to us, to your own people.'

Philanthropy and the arts

Robyn Archer

At a time of much disquiet about federal funding of the arts and some confusion about the proposed Book Council of Australia (whose remit is strangely nebulous), we are pleased to be able to publish Robyn Archer's spirited defence of the creative life. Her article, 'Kindness by Numbers', is an edited version of a paper she delivered at the Melbourne Writers Festival when she debated moral philosopher Peter Singer on the topic 'Is Funding the Arts Doing Good?'.

Professor Singer might not approve of a small new book devoted to Philanthropy and the Arts. Jennifer Radbourne and Kenneth Watkins, its authors, examine The Australian Ballet's phenomenal fundraising success. Christopher Menz – no slouch himself at raising money during his many years as a curator and gallery director, and during his consultancy at ABR – reviews the book here.

Advances attended the Archer–Singer debate, at the end of which Professor Singer reminded the audience that he would be available to sign copies of his book in the tent. Self-interest, like creative endeavour, is alive and well.

ABR on the airwaves

ABR devotees can look forward to a new series of recordings of many different kinds. First up in Poem of the Week we have Kent MacCarter (so mellifluous all poets will want to hire him), followed by Peter Rose, who reads the title poem of his new collection, The Subject of Feeling. This will be accompanied by a series of recordings by ABR Fellows and prize winners. Ashley Hay reads from her Fellowship article in the previous issue. Martin Thomas revisits '"Because it's your country": Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land'. This essay, which won the 2013 Calibre Prize, is by far the best-read feature ever published on our website. These recordings and podcasts are also available from SoundCloud, and will soon be avilable via iTunes.

Pratchett largesse

Terry Pratchett

In late September the University of South Australia announced the creation of a biennial $100,000 Sir Terry Pratchett Memorial Scholarship, funded by a $1 million endowment made to the University by the best-selling UK author. 'Terry was someone who was never shy of contributing to the things he believed in and as recipients of this wonderful bequest we are reminded of his commitment to inquiry and to learning,' said UniSA Vice Chancellor David Lloyd. Pratchett, who died earlier this year, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of South Australia in 2014. He was best-known as the author of the Discworld series which began in 1983 with The Colour of Magic and ended forty-two books later with The Shepherd's Crown, which was posthumously published in August.

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In Trinity Doyle's Pieces of Sky (Allen & Unwin, $16.99 pb, 290 pp, 9781760112486), it has been eight weeks since Lucy's older brother Cam drowned while surfing. Images of his death fill her head and prevent Lucy, a backstroke champion, from returning to the pool. She suffers a panic attack and flees from a training session, unable or unwilling to explain why: 'I know I'm not going to drown – I know it. But my face going under, my breath going away – it would come back – I can't do it.'

Lucy's mother, Norah, an artist, has decorated her son's coffin and then hacked off her hair. She is a shadow of her former self, 'shut down, turned off, collapsed', as Lucy puts it. Lucy is floored when she learns that her mother has a history of depression and wonders whether she passed on 'that silent fight' to Cam. Unable to come to terms with her brother's death, and half-fearing it might not have been an accident, Lucy starts questioning Cam's friends and tries to discover which of them is texting poems to Cam's mobile phone. She finds herself strongly attracted to Evan, a newcomer to their small coastal community, while still harbouring feelings for Ryan, her brother's best friend.

There has been quite a buzz about this début novel, but perhaps because I have read too many recent Young Adult novels that use the death of a young person as a shortcut to emotion, I found myself largely unmoved by Pieces of Sky. While I admire the deft way Doyle intersperses details of hang-gliding in the story to justify her title, the piece of melodrama that gets Lucy back in the water and ends the book is absurd.

While Becoming Kirrali Lewis is being marketed as a Young Adult novel, this big-hearted Australian story could fruit-fully be read in many other ways. Playwright Jane Harrison's début novel about a young indigenous woman's political and personal awakening could be labelled as historical fiction, indigenous writing, or even political fiction. Maureen McCarthy's recent novels The Convent (2012) and Stay With Me (2015), speak to a wider span of generations in similar ways.

In 1965 a busload of students drove through a number of small Australian towns to protest the treatment of Aboriginal people. These events are the backdrop for Sue Lawson's Freedom Ride, a novel set in the fictional town of Walgaree, where racial tensions are high. Robbie, the novel's young protagonist, is generally obliging, but he is at an age where he must choose between remaining silent in order to fit in or sticking his neck out for what he believes is right.

Freedom Ride is set in a time and a place where indigenous locals were all but segregated – the Walgaree RSL doesn't even allow indigenous servicemen to drink at their bar – and it shines an uncomfortable spotlight on Australia's racist past. Robbie is too intimidated by his overbearing Nan and bullying classmates to protest against their racist behaviour. Then he meets Barry Gregory, who has returned to run the local caravan park. Barry gives Robbie a job working alongside Mickey, a young Aborigine. The two boys become friendly, but when news of the 'Freedom Ride' reaches Walgaree, anyone who doesn't know his place is in danger.

Richard Goldstein, one of the first rock critics, has always occupied a weird place in the history of music criticism. His memoir could have sat uneasily as an attempt to justify and reconcile his position, but instead, Goldstein taps into a strangely confessional vein, tracing his history from the Bronx to the Ballroom, finding his home at the Village Voice, with honesty and wit.

The honesty is welcome, even though Goldstein suffers at times from a want of humility. This see-saws throughout: dryly bullish about his role in the countercultural wars, he will just as readily empty the insecurities of the unconscious onto the page. As his engagement with rock'n'roll and pop culture intensifies, so do his cutting rejoinders. His encounters with intellectuals – flinching from Susan Sontag's dry barbs; seeing Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary as the hucksters they are – are hilarious.

The Australian Ballet's role as a leader in philanthropy and fundraising has long been recognised in the arts community. Anyone who has followed the company will be aware of the sophistication of its fundraising activities and its phenomenal success. Much of this has been directed by Kenneth Watkins, who since 1993 has worked in various fundraising roles at The Australian Ballet.

Philanthropy and the Arts examines, through current theory and individual case studies, The Australian Ballet's philanthropic success within the wider context of philanthropy and the arts in Australia. While the historical context here is more applicable to performing arts organisations than to art museums, whose collections since their establishment in the nineteenth century have been largely built on philanthropy, the present-day applications described have sector-wide applications, showing remarkable ingenuity, a willingness to take risks, and success. (Certain literary magazines are finding innovative ways to attract private support.)

Berlin is built on sand, says Stuart Braun in City of Exiles; it is 'never far away from darkness'. It is a city of tolerance, which exerts a psychic pull for anarchists, artists, and those who become Wahlberliners: 'the people who choose to live in Berlin.'

City of Exiles' own sandy foundations make it difficult to find anything solid to hold onto in the early chapters, where Braun is more historian than journalist. There is little narrative other than a kind of wading forwards through time, split with reflections on the city. Braun introduces a cavalcade of exiles and luminaries who hang around for a paragraph and then fall back into Berlin. This idea of names and faces surfacing and sinking runs through City of Exiles, both in the art Braun discusses and the anecdotes he relates. It is an 'image montage' that can suffocate.