The appearance of a new dictionary is always exciting, and the publication of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary is certainly cause for celebration. It is an impressive collection of some 16,000 Australian English expressions contained within two beautifully bound volumes of scholarly lexicography. It should certainly allay any fears about the continued place of 'tree-dictionaries' in this all-digital-all-the-time age of e-publications.

It is not often that a legislative provision leaves the pages of the statute books and enters everyday conversation. Statutory interpretation rarely enters public consciousness. Yet this has been achieved by section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth). It is easily the most famous statutory provision in Australia.

The debate about 18C shows no signs of going away. Controversial at its enactment in 1995, it was, for the next fifteen years, largely uncontroversial. The sustained controversy surrounding 18C followed the Federal Court's decision in Eatock v Bolt. In September 2011, Justice Bromberg found that columns by Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt contravened 18C, by being public acts that were reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate people on the grounds of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, and that Bolt had not established an exemption under 18D – the complementary but often overlooked provision creating defences to 18C.

This is an angry book. David Cay Johnston has been doing investigative reporting on Donald Trump's business practices for nearly three decades, and this book is a compilation of his findings. Most of the information in the book has come out before, but Johnston sees an urgent need to put it all in one place for the world to see. How has the United States come so close to electing this con artist as president? The answer that comes out of these pages is clear: Trump has a lifelong talent for degrading every institution he touches, often to the point of implosion.

Writers have, it seems, an insatiable appetite for reading about writing; and such advice comes in various forms. There are books that promise to teach their readers how to write in any form or genre imaginable. There are books on grammar and punctuation, on contracts, on making a living, on managing your profile. Whatever you want, it seems, you'll be able to find; though the quality is not always certain. This year the publishers have provided two more books in this idiom, each of which enriches the genre. Charlotte Wood, herself an accomplished author, talks with equally accomplished writers about their experience of the business – the life – of writing. (This prodigious effort is made more impressive by the fact that, at the same time, she was writing her Stella Prize-winning novel The Natural Way of Things [2016].) DBC Pierre, enfant terrible of the early 2000s and author of the Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little (2003), offers what the blurb calls an 'irreverent guide to writing fiction', one that skips through principles and technical aspects, and weaves it together with anecdotes from his larger-than-life life.

The term 'green ban', first used in 1973, is so much part of our political vocabulary that we forget it has a specific and Australian genesis, which had considerable influence on the Greens movement internationally. In 1970 the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), under Jack Mundey's leadership, refused to take part in a proposed redevelopment of an area of bushland, known as Kelly's Bush on the foreshores of the Parramatta River. Over the following couple of years, the BLF played a crucial role in blocking 'developments' which would have destroyed large areas of nineteenth-century Sydney. Mundey became a national figure as part of a rapidly growing recognition of the importance of urban heritage. In Sydney, the BLF played a major role in safe-guarding the character of the Rocks, Woolloomooloo, and Centennial Park. The last campaign brought writer Patrick White into an alliance with Mundey that is commemorated in White's play Big Toys (1977).

Sometimes the campaigns to save heritage became major political issues, as in the battle for Victoria Street, the surprisingly quiet street running from Woolloomooloo to Kings Cross. For a few days in 1974 a number of residents engaged in 'the siege of Victoria Street', which became a major media story the following year when one of their more prominent supporters, journalist Juanita Nielsen, disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

Across two new titles, Maxine Beneba Clarke offers an unflinching portrayal of the impact of racism, and transcends form in turning a lens on Australian society. Together, these two works witness the myriad ways in which racism shapes the daily life of its victims, the ongoing impact and the toll on body and mind. We see this damage play out in each work, both in psychological terms and, as she describes in her memoir, physically. 'For most of my school life,' she writes, 'trauma manifested itself on my skin.' Her writing is blunt, uncompromising. Both works utilise repetition to enormous effect, layering instances of prejudice and returning again and again to specific moments of trauma. While the approach in writing differs radically across the two texts, they share stories to create something much larger between them.

The memoir feels in many ways like a shift from Beneba Clarke's poetic approach. It lacks the sharp edge I had expected. Carrying the World offers the same dangerous beauty of her previous poetry collection, nothing here needs fixing (2013) – and indeed incorporates some of the same work. But The Hate Race lacks some of the intricacy of her poetry. The voice is simple and open. Sympathetic to the child's perspective, it predominantly focuses on her school years. And it depends on the appeal of this voice – the familiarity of childhood, the associations of innocence – to carry the emotional power of each moment.

Alex is watching his wife as she stands at the pale stone bench and raises her canister of Chinese herbal tonic to her shoulder to give it a quick shake. She gives him a game, faintly ironic smile, like someone pretending to be a cocktail waitress.

What's in there tastes nothing like a cocktail, Alex knows, because she made him try it the first day. More like lint from the vacuum cleaner, he thought at the time as he struggled to keep it down, blended with something indescribably bitter infused out of the boiled-up leaves and twigs and bits of bark in there. The day of their appointment he'd watched the Chinese herbalist grab small handfuls of this and that out of a wall full of drawers, seemingly at random, the whole place – the clinic, if you could call it that – smelling like anise and liquorice, mushrooms and exotic wood shavings.

He'd struggled to contain his scepticism as the guy had wrapped it all up neatly in white paper and handed it over to Mel, calmly naming a figure at the cash register that Alex thought at first he must have misheard. But Mel had removed her credit card, and handed it over willingly – eagerly, almost, like she was on the right track now and this was the price to be paid. Back at home she'd simmered the mixture exactly as directed in the special pre-purchased ceramic crock and made Alex take a sip.

There is a point of view that says we shouldn't humanise a tyrant such as Adolf Hitler since that reduces the symbolism, the power of his name as a synonym for pure evil, and can lead to excuses and to relativism. Another argument holds that we must understand the psychology and sociology of the individual's rise to power if we are to recognise, and prevent, such developments in the future. The former position is a quasi-religious juxtaposition of good and evil, often held, understandably, by historians of the Holocaust. The latter is the more disinterestedly scholarly and pragmatic approach to political history.

Despite the millions of words written about him since his death by suicide on 30 April 1945, and the ubiquity of imagery spread by everyone from historians to neo-Nazis to pop culture, few comprehensive biographies have been written about Hitler. Read Ian Kershaw's magisterial work (1991) and Joachim Fest's more psychological take (1974) for a thorough overview of the man and his times. Experts add Konrad Heiden and Alan Bullock. These authors' works offer not only multiple perspectives but points of view from the 1930s onwards. Given that Hitler died seventy-one years ago, is there any need to revisit his life?

In order to grasp the complexity of allusions in J.M. Coetzee's new novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, you need to have your wits about you. On the other hand, as with its prequel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), the novel may also be read fairly simply, as a fable. As a sequel to the first 'Jesus' novel, it progresses the story of Simón, Inés, and David, the 'holy family,' as they continue their journey, with their dog Bolívar, from the town named Novilla to a new town, Estrella, meaning 'star' in Spanish, in an unspecified Spanish-speaking country.

As in the earlier novel, there is no character called Jesus; only teasing biblical references that provide an allegorical substratum to the fable-like surface story and that, along with the novel's title, tempt the reader into equating David with Jesus. So Simón is not his real father, but has taken him under his wing as a kind of 'godfather'; Inés is not his real mother, but has been chosen by Simón to act as David's mother. In The Schooldays of Jesus, when David is asked whose son he is, he replies: 'Nobody's.' Later he declares, 'I wanted to be a lifesaver but they wouldn't let me.' Simón can't tell David for sure if he was born 'out of Inés's tummy', as memories and past experiences have been wiped clean in the process of starting their new lives. 'Unable to remember, all you can do, all she can do, all any of us can do is to make up stories,' is Simón's response to David's question about his birth.

When I arrived in America, green card in hand, I soon got down to my favourite pastime: discussing politics over grain-based liquor. I was surprised to find that President Barack Obama was widely reviled. I had spent the previous decade in England and Australia where, in my experience, Obama was considered a decent president or, at least, a decent man. Not, it would seem, in the United States.

That opinions could so differ between Western nations was partly attributable to the radicalisation of American politics in the Obama era. From their first leadership meeting after Obama's election, Republicans mounted an unprecedented 'guerilla war' against his presidency. Denying any Democratic victory was more important than governing. This extremist shift, Jane Mayer argues in Dark Money, reflects a sophisticated, multi-decade effort by a small group of billionaires to inject radical right-wing views into the political mainstream. This might sound a bit Bond villain, but Mayer, a veteran New Yorker journalist, proves her case through masterful investigative reporting.

No one should be surprised that Terry Eagleton has written yet another book about the excesses of academic postmodernism. Railing against the pretensions and deceptions and phony jargon of postmodernism has been a favourite sport of his for more than twenty years. In this latest book, Culture, his specific target is that sinister creeping project, cultural studies, a conceptual field which currently dominates the humanities and social sciences and which Eagleton claims is a crucial obstacle to the ultimate overthrow of capitalism.

Like King Canute, Eagleton sets up his armchair on a shingle beach (Morecambe Beach if we're within spitting distance of his professorial home at Lancaster University) and orders back the tide. Culture, he says, needs to be put back in its place: not everything is cultural, and culture should not be a site for analysing all the world's problems. Instead, he proposes a return to a more modest concept of culture. For Terry Eagleton, it is much handier if culture is understood as a combination of shared habits of mind, patterns of behaviour, and emotional disposition. Culture is what gives life meaning, although it is not to be equated with life. Eagleton imagines culture as a kind of social unconscious or communality of the psyche. His central idea is that we can only completely understand political and economic systems – and ultimately revolutionise them – if we first cotton-on to the shared psychology that underlies them and gives them significance.

Bobbin Up was written in 1958 during eight weeks of the coldest Sydney winter on record', recalled Dorothy Hewett in her introduction to the Virago Modern Classics reprint of her first novel in 1985. Encouraged by Frank Hardy, Hewett wrote it for the Mary Gilmore Award for fiction, to a tight deadline. After being rescued from a cupboard by one of the judges, it won second prize. Published by the leftist Australasian Book Society in 1959, the first edition was a success and the 3,000 copies sold out quickly. But it was not available again until Seven Seas in East Berlin published an English export edition along with its German translation, Die Mädchen von Sydney, in 1965, with a print run of 10,000 copies, from which other Eastern bloc translations followed.

Life, one of Commonwealth's minor characters remarks, is a series of losses. Teresa Cousins acknowledges that life is also other, better things, but that it is the losses that define us – 'as solid and dependable as the earth itself'. This is at the crux of Ann Patchett's seventh novel, but Commonwealth is not a maudlin, grief-stricken ramble through divorce and disaster. To the contrary, it is a deft rendering of complex interfamilial relationships, filled as much with misunderstandings and drama as with reconciliations and humour. Patchett applies the same rules of engagement to this suburban milieu as she did to Bel Canto's far more extreme hostage crisis situation. After Bel Canto (2001) won the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Patchett admitted with unwonted modesty that she had previously tried writing in the omniscient third person but had always failed. Her utilisation of multiple voices and viewpoints now appears effortless.

Commonwealth begins with a christening party and a figure framed in a doorway. Fix Keating, father of baby Franny, struggles to place the fellow standing on his porch. With his recognition of attorney Bert Cousins, the angle widens to include the baby's mother, Beverly, and 'neighbours and friends and people from church and Beverly's sister and all his brothers and their parents and practically an entire precinct worth of cops'. Patchett establishes characters through the timbre of their interior monologues and their attitudes to others. The cast continues to drift in and out of frame as the author pans through the living room, the kitchen, the backyard, providing a glimpse into the mores of 1960s Irish Catholic Los Angelenos. Personalities begin to emerge from the scrum of guests, and it becomes obvious that a couple of marriages are not working. The fatal moment comes with the glimpse of a beautiful face in the crowd.

'Is the Mystery of Raoul Wallenberg's Death Finally Solved?' asked a headline in Israel's Haaretz newspaper, on 6 August 2016. The New York Times published a similar story, reporting on the publication of Notes from a Suitcase: Secret diaries of the first KGB chairman, found over 25 years after his death (2016). Suitcases of journals were discovered hidden in the wall of a house inherited by the granddaughter of the first KGB chairman, Ivan Serov. The diaries state for the first time that the saviour of some 100,000 Hungarian Jews was liquidated on Stalin's orders in a Soviet prison in 1947. Since Wallenberg's arrest by the Soviets, many explanations of his likely fate have circulated, with reported sightings into the 1980s. Determining Wallenberg's fate has been a fervent, worldwide quest. This latest find still needs verification.

Frank Vajda, author of Saved to Remember, published here in June 2016, must be both overcome by this news and disappointed that it did not arrive in time for his book, an account of his own life and his career in medicine, but also a homage to Wallenberg. Like other Hungarians in Australia, Vajda was saved by Wallenberg, an architect and banker turned special envoy sent to Hungary following the Occupation in March 1944. The Nazis, with the complicity of the ruthless Hungarian militia, the Arrow Cross, were determined to rid Hungary of Jews. Vajda's father died of starvation in the Mauthausen camp in 1945 and some sixty members of his extended family also perished.

A sea change has occurred in the way we regard pets. In recent decades the West has fervently embraced pet keeping. Australia has one of the world's highest levels of pet ownership. Moreover, pets are described as 'members of the family'. Pets sleep on our beds, join us on holidays, and receive human-grade medical treatment. Furthermore, our moral concern for animals has generally risen. Witness the public concern with Australian live animal export and the greyhound racing industry.

American bioethicist Jessica Pierce explores some consequences of this social shift in Run, Spot, Run: The ethics of keeping pets. The title, borrowed from the blandly happy 1930s Dick and Jane school readers, is double-edged. Spot the frolicking dog is, like Dick and Jane, having fun. But Spot is also running from us. Pet keeping is a story of brutality as well as love. Pierce both celebrates pet–human relations and reveals their darker side. As the book proceeds, the darkness gathers.

Run, Spot, Run unflinchingly exposes what has made contemporary pet–person relations troubling and hence 'ethically rich'. Of course, some unsettling elements were never really hidden. The 'single biggest moral problem', the author rightly says, is the many 'relinquished animals languishing in ... shelters, pounds, and humane societies'.

In 1915 a young Englishman was repatriated from the Western front to Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital in Scotland. Traumatised and disillusioned, he would write the best-known anthem of his doomed generation. Wilfred Owen's horror was replicated across the war zones of the twentieth century. Shell shock, epitomising the catastrophic new relationship between man and machine, is Philipp Blom's unifying metaphor in Fracture: Life and culture in the West 1918–1938, a popular history of the interwar years (1918–38).

Fracture begins with an episode linking US events to the wider Western world, signalling that this is the story of the West, not just Europe. In 1920 Mamie Smith created history as the first black artist to make a blues recording. For Blom, this event was not just about race. Smith sang of unadorned emotion, bringing popular culture into the mainstream. Jazz was the iconic release from the confines of the pre-war world, and just one of transnational imports that ushered in the era of American supremacy. The following year links the rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors, brutally suppressed by Lenin, with the labour strife splitting the United States and fatally weakening the American workers unions. Edwin Hubble's identification in 1923 of a cepheid variable star in the galaxy of Andromeda provided data that would galvanise German physicist Werner Heisenberg to formulate quantum mechanics.

After reading her début novel about Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland, no one is likely to pick up a book by Hannah Kent expecting a frothy comedy set in a sun-drenched contemporary location, but even for the author of Burial Rites (2013) this compelling new historical novel ventures into grim and shadowy territory.

The Good People was inspired by an article about an unusual Irish trial that Kent came across while doing research for Burial Rites. As the London Morning Advertiser reported in 1826, the main witness claimed that the actions undertaken by the accused were not done with intent to harm the child 'but to cure it – to put the fairy out of it'.

As Kent acknowledges in an author letter included in advance copies, she writes books 'about dark happenings in cold places'. However, where Burial Rites gradually moves towards understanding, acceptance, and redemption, The Good People is far bleaker, with few characters left unscathed. Setting the tone for the novel by prefacing it with the lyrics of an Irish murder ballad from 1600, Kent dives deep into the murky waters of human nature, finding there is nothing so potentially lethal as the combination of desperation, false hope, and blind faith when added to grief, superstition, and ignorance.

When Viktor Shklovsky, in his famous 1917 essay 'Art as Technique', asserts that the fundamental task of the poetic function is one of 'making strange' the reader's customary perceptions, he is arguing for more than just the avoidance of linguistic cliché. Through the medium of poetic form, the accepted conventions of our habitualised view of the world can be defamiliarised: the political implications of this approach directly influenced Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, and in turn underwrite Roland Barthes's structuralist unmasking of societal 'mythologies'.

The Russian Formalist critics – and their counterparts in practice, the avant-garde Futurist poets – are frequently cited as precursors by the American poet and critic Charles Bernstein, along with Wittgenstein's similar explorations of the manner in which our perception of the world is shaped by language. (Bernstein's undergraduate dissertation, later published as Three Compositions on Philosophy and Literature [1972], linked Wittgenstein's 'linguistic turn' to the textual experiments of Gertrude Stein.) Yet the political claims made for their often wilfully 'difficult' poems by Bernstein and his associates in the burgeoning international field of 'Language' practitioners have often been contested: as a somewhat perplexed Chinese interviewer puts the question to Bernstein here, 'L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is generally regarded as a renegade brand, but in what way is it rebellious?' Or, as the poet Jackson Mac Low once asked: 'What could be more of a fetish or more alienated than slices of language stripped of reference?'

Rain delays at sporting events are not reserved exclusively for reading Australian literature, which I think is a great shame. For example, in July 2016, Alex James, a cricket fan from Brisbane, decided during a washed out session of the First Test between Sri Lanka and Australia to frolic naked on the slickened ground covers, an act for which he was jailed for a week and fined 3,000 rupees (approximately $28). I know this because I overheard two men discussing it merrily on my regular train trip between the Blue Mountains and Sydney. Normally I would have been mildly annoyed – we were in the quiet carriage – but, since I was in the process of reading Jock Serong's second novel, The Rules of Backyard Cricket, their intervention seemed timely.

'Timely' is how Malcolm Knox, on the front cover, describes The Rules of Backyard Cricket, and it's clear he means no coincidence with Sydney Trains or with my reading habits; he means the scandals that dog professional sport, from performance-enhancing drugs to match-fixing, via the occasionally appalling off-field behaviour of young men and women (though mostly men) caught up in the heady mix of being an élite athlete, a celebrity, and a role model. How this behaviour may in some instances shade from larrikinism to self-sabotage, or even cause lasting harm to other people, is the driving concern of Serong's new novel.

In March of 1966, Los Angeles rock group The Byrds released their sixth single, a song called 'Eight Miles High'. It was, writes Jon Savage, a song that combined 'two staples of sixties minority taste: free jazz and Indian classical music'. The arrangement was spacious, but the mood was uneasy: a twelve-string guitar part evoked the sour, droning tone of a sitar. The lyrics, chiefly written by band member Gene Clark, alluded to an LSD trip without naming it as such. Though LSD was still legal in 1966, its widening use had prompted an increase in policing: in February of that year, the first arrest was made in Britain for possession of the drug.

'Eight Miles High' laid the foundation for psychedelic rock, a style – and a lifestyle – that would come to dominate the late 1960s counterculture. In his new book 1966: The year the decade exploded, Savage argues that the year marked a turning point, particularly in Britain and the United States. Youthful rebellion, familiar from the rock'n'roll 1950s, was turning into a confirmed opposition to the Vietnam War, organised religion, consumerism, and conservative morality. It was, Savage writes, 'a year of noise and tumult', and he navigates it by way of popular music.

David Hume earned his place in the philosophical pantheon mostly because of the uncompromising empiricism of his early work A Treatise of Human Nature (1738). He looked into his mind and found no such thing as the will or an agent that directs it. He found nothing in the world to explain causal connection and concluded that predicting the future depends on an inclination of mind. Sympathy and utility, he argued, are the ground of morality, and reason is the slave of passion. Generations of philosophers have contended with Humean scepticism about knowledge and agency.

In this intellectual biography, James A. Harris aims to present a different Hume from the one known by philosophers. He pays equal attention to Hume's political, economic, and historical writings and gives an account of his intentions that challenges the prevailing interpretation of his intellectual trajectory.

Hume was born in 1711, the second son of a lowland Scottish family that was well off but not so rich as to relieve him of the need to find a profession. However, the need was not so pressing as to force him into an uncongenial occupation, and he spent much of his early adulthood in his family home immersed in books. Later, he became the secretary of an ambassador. He travelled in Europe and lived in Paris and London. But he was content to settle down in Edinburgh in the company of his friends. He was proud of being a Scot.

Philippe Sands, a barrister and Professor of International Law at University College London, brings together in this multi-faceted book the perpetrators of the worst crime yet devised by man and pits them against two lawyers who were instrumental in providing the legal underpinning for their conviction. This is no dry legal tome: the story Sands tells is intensely moving and a personal family memoir about his maternal grandfather, Leon Buchholz, and his wife, Rita.

The story centres around Lviv, a city which changed hands eight times between 1914 and 1945. When it was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was known as Lemberg. After 1918 it became part of Poland and was renamed Lwów. Later, when conquered by the Soviets, it was known as Lvov. During World War II Germans occupied the city. Finally, after 1945 it became part of Ukraine and reverted to Lviv.

Lviv was where some of the Sandses were taken and never heard of again. Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin also studied law there. Lauterpacht moved to Vienna to further his studies, and then to England. At Cambridge he became a distinguished international lawyer; later a judge of the International Court of Justice. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Lauterpacht effectively wrote modern international law. Lauterpacht's son, Sir Eli, who is also a distinguished international lawyer, taught Sands at Cambridge.

Miracles are not like tempests.
Furlongs are not like hedgerows
though they come close.

His feet were stubborn
on the frozen path.
He put it into His hand, then
they walked along a bit. The mud
splashed; it was all coming back,
that big cow with a bullet-head
bending over his bed
in a dream. His jaw was swollen
with a bull's eye,
his shadow bunched on the wall.

Who was Phillip Schuler? A war correspondent for The Age, his six-week visit to Gallipoli in July and August 1915 produced, inter alia, a few of the rare eyewitness accounts of the battle and resulted in the first extended treatment of the Gallipoli campaign: Australia in Arms (1916). Schuler also compiled a unique photographic record of some of the battlefields and the living conditions in the trenches. Later enlisting as a soldier, he served in Flanders where, in April 1917, aged twenty-seven, he was fatally wounded by a stray shell.

The works he bequeathed, the events that spawned them, and the legend that has grown up around them have long overshadowed Schuler's short life. Mark Baker sets out to rescue him, not from the condescension of history, but from the wheels of the mythic juggernaut that he helped put together and propel. It's a noble aim, but the book doesn't quite get there. Mesmerised by the myth- making, and chary of too trenchant a reappraisal of its key components, Baker struggles to sustain his concentration, and his focus on Schuler flickers and fades. In the end, Schuler emerges from the book as more a catalyst than a fully-fledged figure, the vehicle rather than the destination.

Ruins is the impressive début novel of Rajith Savanadasa, born in Sri Lanka and now living in Melbourne. He is founder and primary contributor to Open City Stories, a website documenting the lives of a group of asylum seekers in Melbourne, lives that may have been in similar ruins to those described in the book.

Five voices tell the story set in the anxious period at the end of the twenty-six-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War. Since 1983 an intermittent insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had torn the country apart. The Tigers' dream of an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka's north and east finally ended on 18 May 2009 when government troops defeated the remaining Tigers.

All thirty-three short stories in Michelle Wright's Fine echo the powdery residue and hairline fractures printed on the cover. Silt and grit and cinders: Wright writes of people navigating worlds often on the brink of crumbling. From the blurry aftermath of the Sri Lankan tsunami to the static shock following a hurried phone call revealing betrayal, Wright's characters stay quietly strong as certainties dissolve around them.

What is the definition of the postmodern concept known as cybernetics? Englishman and mathematician Thomas Rid, a professor in the War Studies department at King's College, London, comprehensively documents the history of cybernetics in his book Rise of the Machines. First, though, he discusses the problem of defining cybernetics. It seems like a logical place to start. Logical it may be, but easy it isn't.

Cybernetics is a postmodern concept; it resists attempts to be pigeonholed with one universally accepted definition. It employs the usual suspects, such as self-awareness, great promise, paradox, parody, and a god complex. Stafford Beer, a UK theorist, specialising in management cybernetics, relates a joke which sums up the dilemma of defining cybernetics.

Poetry as the solidifying of memory, poetry as a survivor's sanguine amusement, takes a lifetime. Louise Nicholas relates autobiography through strongly considered moments in time in The List of Last Remaining (Five Islands Press, $25.95 pb, 85 pp, 9780734051998). Her childhood is tracked by the small fears, confusions, and elations that only later feel like turning points:

                 in the same year but not the day
that President Kennedy was shot in Texas,
I sit on the sidelines at my first high school social
wondering what to make of a new betrayal:
the flowered bodice of my favourite party frock
straining to contain an embarrassment of breasts
where once there was little more than the rise
and fall of my breath.
                                                           ('Aged Thirteen')

Iron in the Blood is jazz musician Jeremy Rose's ambitious and heartfelt tribute to Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore (1986). Although some academic historians may demur, The Fatal Shore remains a crucial book for understanding the brutality of Australia's colonial origins.

Shakespeare's King Lear exists in two significantly different versions, the quarto (Q) published in 1608 and the folio (F) of 1623. Scholars typically believe that the play was altered for performances after its first printing. Possibly this took place around 1610, when the King's Men were interested enough in the legendary history of Britain to perform Cymbeline. The folio text was the seeming product of these revisions.

Distinctive features of Q include a more elaborate mock trial; the pathos of servants helping the blinded Gloucester; and a more substantial denunciation of Goneril by Albany. By contrast, Albany is systematically demonised in F (including having his final speech reassigned to Edgar); F has the Fool's famous prophecy; and F consistently politicises the action in a way not found in Q. The Folio text justifies Lear's decision to divide the kingdom between the dukes ('while we / Unburthen'd crawle toward death') somewhat more than Q, and it amplifies the uncomfortable exchange of 'nothings' between Lear and Cordelia. Perhaps most interestingly, Lear dies differently in Q and F. He has a moment of delusion in F ('Do you see this? Looke on her? Looke her lips, / Looke there, looke there ...') before dying, causing Kent so much pain that he wishes his own heart would break. In the quarto, Lear wills his own heart to break, and then expires.

Formerly only known to historians and specialists, either in the original German or the author's abridged translation, Friedrich Gerstäcker's Australian travelogue (1854), based on his 1851 journey, is now available in a modern and complete translation, edited by Peter Monteath. It is well worth reading, both for its account of colonial Australia and for the author's engaging style.

Feeble times

Dear Editor,
Alan Atkinson's study of national conscience and how it has functioned in Australia is timely ('How Do We Live With Ourselves?' September 2016). Returning to the eighteenth century, he argues that such a thing as a national conscience might exist but that it is 'especially feeble' at present. Naturally, this feebleness is seen and expressed in Australia's policies on offshore detention.

Australia's policies on offshore detention didn't exist until recently. For most of the twentieth century, Australia maintained bipartisan policies on migration. Aside from the postwar migration of displaced persons, the acme of national policy was the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees from a united Vietnam from 1975 onwards. We can regain that bipartisanship, I believe. All that is needed is a refusal to use the issue for political advantage.

While Atkinson goes into considerable detail in his account, he doesn't mention the way this bipartisanship was lost. John Howard and Tony Abbott are the people who are culpable here. National conscience has been readily vulnerable to desperate political unscrupulousness.

Kym Houghton, Carisbrook, Vic.

Pragmatic arguments

Dear Editor,
I understand Alan Atkinson's intent in claiming that 'foreign aid is an index of a nation's moral self-confidence', but this overlooks the very real pragmatic arguments in favour of international development assistance which, unfortunately perhaps, are likely to have more purchase in the current political environment than are claims for moral conscience. As many of us have argued, foreign aid is an extremely important pragmatic step towards increasing Australian and global security. I develop this argument in a recent article: 'A more humane Australian foreign policy'.

And while I agree that our current treatment of asylum seekers is a graphic indictment of Australian morality, the damage done to Australia's international reputation by our regimes of brutality on Manus and Nauru is more likely to have some impact on our major parties than positioning this as a moral challenge. After all, our current prime minister seems to reserve moral challenges for economic management, while denying any responsibility for the regime of terror conducted in Australia's name in offshore detention centres.

Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.

Trumped

Dear Editor,
I was shocked and disgusted to read Beejay Silcox's description of Donald Trump's followers as 'rednecks, idiots and xenophobic lunatics' ('Letter from America' September 2016). When President Trump restores America to prosperity and its past greatness, I hope she sends him an apology.

Sandy Thorne (online comment)

Long live magazines!

Dear Editor,
Many thanks for your mention of the current issue of Westerly Magazine (61.1) in 'Advances' (September 2016). The time I spent with you and your team in Melbourne was of enormous benefit to me. The state of arts funding nationally makes this collegiality between magazines all the more valuable. In working with you, and in improving Westerly's networks with other east-coast publications, I have had the chance to represent Westerly to new audiences, creating exposure for the Western Australian voices within, and illustrating Westerly's interest in writers from across the nation. The opportunity to learn from your processes and production will support my efforts as editor of Westerly, particularly in the development of initiatives like issue 61.1 and its celebration of Indigenous writing and culture.

We have been excited to follow the release of the issue with another announcement: the commencement of Dr Elfie Shiosaki (Curtin University) as Westerly's first Editor for Indigenous Writing. Dr Shiosaki will be working to commission and edit Indigenous work for publication in every issue of Westerly forthcoming, starting with our November issue this year (61.2). This is part of our desire to make a space for Indigenous voices within Westerly's general remit, and to celebrate the continuous living cultures of Australia's First Nation peoples.

Thanks again for your kind support, and long live Australian literary magazines!

Catherine Noske, Editor, Westerly

A piece of the main

Dear Editor,
In reviewing Sylvia Martin's Ink in her Veins, a life of Aileen Palmer, Dr Susan Lever questions whether it is an appropriate subject for a biography (June–July 2016). I suggest that it is.

As an expatriate, Palmer worked as translator with the British Medical Unit during the Spanish Civil war, meeting a number of writers and recording graphic experiences in her letters. When she returned home to Melbourne, her life was plagued by a series of breakdowns. Martin depicts Palmer's experience in detail, showing how she and her parents (Vance and Nettie Palmer) and friends (including Flora Eldershaw, David Martin, K.S. Prichard, Stephen Murray-Smith) tried to cope.

Palmer, who had ambitions as a writer, continued to produce mostly unpublished fragments. It is true, as Lever points out, that Martin has not retrieved 'a significant writer or public figure', but this was not intended. Palmer's unpublished writings show her potential. She had the poetic spark, writing in the tradition of social protest verse. Her writing shows her continued struggle to resist the isolation associated with her condition by making her life 'a piece of the main'.

One of Martin's biography's attractions is the literary tact with which she engages readers' empathy without special pleading. Importantly, Martin wears her scholarship lightly: the immense labour of sifting through the Aileen Palmer papers, now part of the great Palmer archive.

Laurie Hergenhan, St Lucia, Qld

BRAGGING RIGHTS

Advances was delighted to see that Ashley Hay's ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship essay 'The forest at the edge of time', published in our October 2015 Environment issue, has been shortlisted for the 2016 Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing. The Bragg Prize is for short non-fiction pieces of science writing aimed at a general audience. Also on this year's shortlist are pieces by James Bradley, Susan Double, Nicole Gill, Alice Gorman, and Fiona McMillan. The winner of the $7,000 prize will be announced on 10 November (along with two runners up who will each receive $1500). All the shortlisted pieces will feature in The Best Australian Science Writing 2016 edited by Jo Chandler which NewSouth will publish in November. Ashley Hay's essay can be read in ABR Online and she also recently recorded it for the ABR Podcast.

VALE INGA CLENDINNEN

Inga ClendinnenAdvances was saddened to hear of the death of internationally acclaimed writer and historian Inga Clendinnen AO on 8 September at the age of eighty-two. An acclaimed scholar of Aztec and Mayan culture and society, Clendinnen also published on other major historical and personal subjects. Among her best-known works are Reading the Holocaust (1998), Dancing with Strangers (2003), and the powerful memoir Tiger's Eye (2000).

Clendinnen also wrote for ABR. Her first appearance was a one-page 'microstory' titled 'Lace', which was published in May 1994, and her last was in April 2008 as part of a special feature marking ABR's 300th issue. In her contribution she reflected on how she wrote her first books 'as offerings to the Mesoamerican Academy across the Water, which I imagined as very like Nine Mayan Lords of Death: nameless, aloof, implacable and almost certainly fatal' and her subsequent meeting (through a review published in ABR) with former ABR Editor Helen Daniel who introduced her to the 'Republic of Letters, Australian Branch'.

Clendinnen received a liver transplant in 1994 and, as Text Publishing director Michael Heyward wrote in an obituary published in The Australian (13 September 2016),

Three years later Inga dedicated Agamemnon's Kiss, a thrilling book of essays, to her unknown donor. It was her coda to everything life had revealed to her about writing and thinking. 'Now I know how I want death to come for me,' she wrote, 'strolling in the slanting rain of light through eucalyptus leaves, a strip of bark in my fingers, the gurgle of hidden magpies all around. I will say to Death, "A moment, friend." And then: "I'm ready now."'

ARTS ISSUE – 10 NOVEMBER

ABR will celebrate the launch of its annual Arts issue with a special event at the Monash University Museum of Art (Caulfield) at 6pm on 10 November. This event will also see the introduction of our new Laureate and the announcement of the Laureate's Fellow. Please see our website for more information. This is a free event but bookings are requested to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

VALE RICHARD NEVILLE

Oz magazine, no.33Advances was also saddened to hear of the death of Australian writer, editor, and social commentator Richard Neville on September 4 at the age of seventy-four. Neville was best known as a co-editor of the satirical counterculture magazine Oz, which was launched on April Fool's Day in 1963, and which was the subject of an infamous obscenity trial in the United Kingdom following the publication in 1970 of an issue edited by teenagers. As one of the young guest editors, Charles Shaar Murray, later reflected in an article published in the Guardian in 2001, 'This was a cultural war disguised as an obscenity trial ... The fact that, between verdict and sentencing, the Oz three were subjected to forcible haircuts was a valuable clue towards figuring out what their real crimes were.' Richard Neville appeared in ABR in September 2002 as part of a symposium published to accompany Morag Fraser's La Trobe University essay on the aftermath of September 11.

DOUBLE TAKE

Keen-eyed Island website visitors will have noticed a new addition to their Take Two subscription section. ABR is delighted to be partnering with Island, and other magazines including Griffith Review, Westerly, and The Lifted Brow to offer these special joint print subscriptions. The bundled subscriptions will be rolling out across our websites in coming months, so keep an eye out for more information.

FREE GIFT SUBSCRIPTION TO ABR

New and renewing subscribers have until 31 December to give a friend a six-month subscription to ABR (print or online). You can qualify for this special offer by renewing your current subscription even before it is due to lapse. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc. Why not introduce a young reader or writer to ABR?

All you have to do is fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies this issue, or contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (quoting your subscriber number, if you have one). We will contact the nominated recipient to establish whether he or she wants the print edition or ABR Online (thus we will need the recipient's email address). Terms and conditions apply.

Which poets have most influenced you?

My first poetic influences were all American, due to the fact that I spent my critical early reading years in the United States. My poetic imagination is steeped in the disjecta membra of poets like Bishop, Stevens, Bogan, Dickinson, Ammons, Lowell, Moore, Hughes, Rich, and Eliot; I couldn’t erase their presence if I tried. Bishop, in particular, is a poet I never tire of – her forensic eye and tremendous command of the line are extraordinary. Beyond those earliest influences, there are too many poets to begin naming names, for fear of never stopping. Recently, I’ve been blown over by the exquisite, savage poems of Pascale Petit, particularly those in Fauverie.

When did you first write for ABR?

I came to ABR as an unpublished writer in 2011 after an invitation to write on Ernest Hemingway. I promptly read all of Hemingway. The resulting publication (February 2012) was my first review.