Beneath a frantic veneer of normalcy, American politics is not okay. It is as if Punch and Judy have careened out of a dive bar, tripped down the rabbit hole, smashed head-first through the looking glass, and found themselves running all three branches of government. Core to this is that unlikely combination of words, President Donald Trump.

Years ago, when I was editing a magazine, John Clarke would occasionally ring, sometimes to discuss what might have been called business, but, more often, just out of the blue. John would talk and I would listen. And so would the entire office staff – listen. They’d get the cue from our wily receptionist, pick up their extensions and stop work for the duration of the call. If they’d had an enterprise agreement, I would have made sure it included that time out, and immunity from prosecution under privacy laws. Innocent days. Days of joy. Even Gough Whitlam, who would also call occasionally, couldn’t command quite the same degree of blissful communal eavesdropping.

_David Marr’s interlocking identities as consummate essayist, journalist of forty-five years, ferocious biographer, and staunch cosmopolitan increasingly eclipse his subject. He wears the condition honestly and inelegantly. ‘I’m a grumpy old guy who hasn’t found in twenty years another big life worth writing’, he remarked in his 2016 Seymour Biography Lecture. Instead, ‘I write little lives these days, of priests and politicians.’ After his magnum opus, Patrick White: A life (1991), Marr adapted his biographical skill to mapping the littleness of a powerful few – each in the brevity of a Quarterly Essay. Pauline Hanson is his latest ‘little life’. In The White Queen: One Nation and the politics of race, the two themes of his oeuvre – frustrated biographer of an ex parte national life and forensic reporter of political controversy – entwine as he sets out to prove that Australia is better than our irrepressible white queen.

Jennifer Maiden’s latest book, The Metronome, is essentially part of a series that could be dated to the appearance of Friendly Fire in 2005, if not further back. While it may not be a series in the sense of a life-poem, Maiden’s ongoing production of this sequence of books carries an impression of vocation or serious commitment, rather than simply poems-as-project.

There are continuing characters in Maiden’s work, recurring structures (the dialogue between characters of the past and the present being chief among these, such as the ongoing one between Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt), and a fearless interrogation of the moral complexities of our age, which allows the books to hinge on a dialectic of voicings, between dialogic/plural, and a more singular individual voice.

Of course, a reader, especially a reader new to Maiden’s work, might question the validity of her approach, especially with respect to the dialogue poems. We cannot know what any of these current or historical figures really think. Yet, our histories and thinking, and the current media, are full of presumptions, falsities, rushes to judgement, so it is more than simply refreshing to encounter another way of speaking about and through such personae. Maiden sets up a place for an ethical as well as aesthetic encounter; sets up a way of learning how to think about these issues. And that way is through poetry, through lines, stanzas, description, tropes, sonic effects, through dialogue and event.

John Clarke

Since his death on 9 April 2017 there have been many fine tributes to John Clarke, the New Zealand-born satirist, actor, and writer. His sudden death while hiking in the Grampians shocked many (he was only sixty-eight) and deprives Australian readers and television viewers of a wonderfully dry, often very funny, and much-needed iconoclast. Morag Fraser – who for many years edited Eureka Street – lauds the irrepressible Clarke and recalls his hilarious telephone conversations in a personal tribute in this issue. Meanwhile, we have republished Brian Matthews’s review of John Clarke’s book The Tournament, which appeared in the February 2003 issue of ABR.

Porter Prize

In late March, one of our larger Porter Prize audiences gathered at Collected Works Bookshop for readings of the seven shortlisted poems and the naming of the winner. This year our three judges – Ali Alizadeh, Jill Jones, Felicity Plunkett – split the Prize, as happened in 2011.

The co-winners of this year’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize are Louis Klee (Victoria) and Damen O’Brien (Queensland). They were chosen from a record field of almost 1,000 entries, from twenty-two countries (the USA was represented by two poets on the shortlist, one of whom, Michael Lee Phillips, attended the ceremony).

Louis Klee, currently studying in the UK, was represented by 2012 winner, Michael Farrell, who read his poem ‘Sentence to Lilacs’. Klee told Advances: ‘What an honour, shock, and delight to share this award with Damen O’Brien, and indeed all the past winners. I am immensely grateful to the judges and to Australian Book Review. Finally, transgressing temporal boundaries and cultural milieux, I wish to express an infinite gratitude to Aimé Césaire, for it was only in returning to Cahier d’un retour that what began as a draft in 2009 became the present poem.’

2017 Porter Prize winners Louis Klee and Damen O'Brien

Damen O’Brien, whose poem is titled ‘pH’, alliterated thus: ‘There are few competitions in Australia that have the prestige and profile of the PPPP. I have read and reread the shortlists of the Prize for years. These are great poems by great poets I respect, and I feel humbled to have my poem join that list.’

We look forward to presenting the fourteenth Porter Prize in 2018.

Joy to the World

The Porter Prize is one of several lucrative poetry competitions in this prize-happy land. The Australian Catholic University (ACU) Prize for Poetry is worth a total of $18,000, with a first prize of $10,000. There is a happy caveat, though: entries must be joyous. Fr Anthony Casamento, the Prize’s sponsor, has commented: ‘At a time of uncertainty across the world, we need to be joy-filled people. Poetry is a powerful medium on how joy can be manifested, or how its absence can be damaging.’ Entries close on 3 July. Visit the ACU website for details.

Jolley Prize

When entries closed for the 2017 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, we had received about 1,150 entries, from forty-one countries. Judging is underway, and we look forward to publishing the three shortlisted stories in our August issue, ahead of the Jolley Prize ceremony in Sydney later that month.

The Text Prize shortlist

This year four titles have been shortlisted for the tenth annual Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing. The shortlisted works are The Extremely Weird Thing That Happened At Huggabie Falls by Adam Cece, The Art of Taxidermy by Sharon Kernot, Bonesland by Brendan Lawley, and The Peacock Detectives by Carly Nugent and for the first time Text has announced that all four shortlisted authors will be offered book deals. The winner will be revealed at an event in Melbourne on May 3. Visit Text’s website for more information about the four shortlisted titles.

NSW Premier's Literary Awards

The shortlists have been revealed for the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (worth a total of $310,000) and voting is now open for the 2017 People’s Choice Award. Winners will be announced on 22 May 2017. 

Ernest Scott Prize

Tom Griffiths (photograph by Jason McCarthy, National Museum of Australia)It’s not all joy and skittles amid this plethora of prizes. History is not overlooked. Four scholarly works were shortlisted in the 2017 Ernest Scott Prize, presumably the country’s oldest history book prize (it was first awarded in 1952). The shortlisted titles were: A History of New Zealand Women (Barbara Brookes, Bridget Williams Books); Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier violence, affective performances, and imaginative refoundings (Penelope Edmonds, Palgrave Macmillan); The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (Tom Griffiths, Black Inc.); and Paved with Good Intentions: Terra Nullius, Aboriginal land rights and settler-colonial law (Hannah Robert, Halstead Press).

Professor Tom Griffiths was named the winner in early April; he receives $13,000. Few Australian histories have been so widely lauded; even fewer wear their scholarship so lightly. The judges – Professors Fiona Paisley (Griffith University) and Judith Bennett (Otago) – described The Art of Time Travel as a ‘wonderful meditation for historians and a beautifully written homage to the craft of writing history’.

Melbourne Jewish Book Week

On May 28, Melbourne Jewish Book Week will present its first event ahead of its first full program in May next year. ‘Here I Am’ has been curated by Gary Abrahams and will take place at Melbourne’s Astor Theatre. The evening will feature original works from Arnold Zable, Leah Kaminsky, Steven Amsterdam, Elise Hearst, Nadja Spiegelman, and Nevo Zisin.Visit their website for more information.

Who is the I in Helen Garner’s work? This is the question Bernadette Brennan probes by canvassing more than forty years of Garner’s writing and her seventy-four-year existence. It is the proposition Garner’s fans and critics are most exercised by, although some presume to know the answer by reading her fiction as autobiography and her non-fiction as personal opinion.

Brennan examines both assumptions by tracing Garner’s steps to becoming a full-time writer in a style that is both thoughtful and readable. The framework is Garner’s lived experience and life-altering influences; the focus is Garner’s self-doubt and self-questioning, extensive reading, research, and journal keeping. Her personal life is sketchy at best; details are selected chiefly for their impact on her work and states of mind. And yet they are sufficient to orient the reader in time and place, and to sustain a biographical thread through chapters delineated by Garner’s various writings. As it turns out, a detailed biographical account is hardly necessary; Garner’s output so closely reflects the high and low points of her life. Furthermore, everything Garner has written is interrelated, says Brennan. Garner has revisited themes, relationships, situations, characters, and questions in a body of work encompassing fiction and non-fiction, essays, screenplays, short stories, and journalism.

In 2004 the Indonesian foreign minister, Nur Hassan Wirajuda, learned that Australia had established a 1000-mile maritime exclusion zone as part of its asylum-seeker policy. It had not consulted Jakarta. ‘You are blessed with a country that is rich in ideas and initiatives, declared Wirajuda. ‘Unfortunately, we seem to be on the receiving end of most of them.’

Allan Gyngell’s new history of Australian foreign policy since 1942 provides a strong flavour of the richness of the ideas that have emanated from the fertile minds of Australian policy-makers and diplomats over the last seventy-five years. He also shows that these ideas have on occasion been bad ones, and that they have not always been well received by those with whom Australia has done its business.

Still, Gyngell is mainly positive about the Australian foreign policy legacy. Australia, he points out, ‘is peaceful, prosperous, well-regarded’. It increasingly has a seat at the table when the rules are being made about matters such as arms control and the environment. To borrow a concept favoured by Gareth Evans, one of Australia’s most distinguished foreign ministers, it has done its best to be a good international citizen.

Gyngell, a former Keating staffer, has headed the Office of National Assessments and was founding executive director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. This was never going to be a dissident history. As even a glance at the acknowledgments page reveals, it is very much the work of a policy insider, one who has been involved in many of the debates, episodes, and issues being surveyed. This involvement is rarely signalled directly; apart from a disclosure in the chapter on the 1990s that he was Paul Keating’s senior international adviser, Gyngell is silent on his own role. This is dispassionate history, not memoir or advocacy.

Email is a chimeric beast, an uneasy mix of intimacy and distance – unlimited time and space to say precisely what we mean, coupled with the unnerving promise of instant delivery. When it first arrived, email seemed to invite a new kind of writing – deliberate, earnest, vulnerable. We tried to sound smarter and wittier than we were, and it showed. The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s début novel, inhabits those gloriously pretentious early days, before email became a burden, when we used it to craft elaborate musings and manifestos, and to disguise our love letters as musings and manifestos.

The eponymous twit of The Idiot is Selin Karadağ, a New Jersey-born daughter of Turkish immigrants, who dreams of becoming a writer, or rather, believes that she is already a writer, a conviction ‘completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read’. When Selin arrives at Harvard in 1995, an email address is waiting for her, with all of its shiny possibilities and pitfalls. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world ... And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you. All the words you threw out, they came back.’

Scurvy

Dear Editor,
All authors are perhaps oversensitive to reviews of their books, but I have never been tempted to quarrel with a reviewer until now. Alan Atkinson’s review of Scurvy: The disease of discovery (April 2017) contains a broad assault on the place of literature in an historical understanding of the past, and specifically its place in the history of medicine, that is astonishing for its peremptory and illiberal tone. Professor Atkinson’s defence of the factual basis of history is also remarkable for its contempt of facts themselves. So I’ll cite some examples.

The picture of icebergs William Hodges over-painted with the pastoral view of Cook’s encampment at Dusky Bay is too trivial to be proposed as an example, says Atkinson. Yet the optical illusion of a sea turned green is an attested condition of photic damage called calenture, often allied with scorbutic reveries of delightful green vegetation – see the physician Thomas Trotter, Observations on Scurvy; the scientist Erasmus Darwin (‘Calenture’, in Zoonomia) and the trivial examples of this condition explored by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick and William Wordsworth in The Brothers. François Péron’s sudden passion for collecting seashells on the South Australian shore ‘does not prove he had scurvy’. Yet Péron records that, before scurvy became really bad on Baudin’s expedition, he was suffering from swollen and bleeding gums, and Baudin accounts for Péron’s distracted behavior as a result of scurvy growing widespread on the ship. He adds that Péron has just improbably laid claim to the discovery of a river fringed with abundant vegetation of an exquisite green.

More serious is the charge that I confuse the dates of scurvy in the Australian colony as a whole with the time-frame I apply solely to the penal settlements, particularly Port Arthur. Atkinson laughs at my using Saxby Pridmore as my authority, but the facts I was using I garnered from Select Committee Reports, John Gold’s correspondence, the Tasmanian State Archives, James Backhouse’s eyewitness accounts, and that ‘banal distraction’ Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life. If fruit was growing in luscious abundance in Tasmania in 1834, why were there nineteen patients dying of scurvy in the Port Arthur hospital? That is a question I tried seriously to answer. If Atkinson wants to dispute any of the judgements about a delinquent governing class I extract from my facts, he need go no farther for their sources than the 1837 Select Committee Report on Transportation, Jeremy Bentham’s A Plea for the Constitution and William Bligh’s An Account of the Rebellion. Then he might have a few of his own with which to buttress his absurd demand, ‘What does a more detailed understanding of scurvy really add to our appreciation of literature as literature? ... From an historical point of view it is a triviality, and from a literary point of view it is a banal distraction.’ That is language I never thought to read from the pen of anyone even pretending to an interest in the humanities.

Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, USA

Alan Atkinson replies:

I am very sorry that Jonathan Lamb has been so seriously offended by my review of his book. Anyone who has read any of my work, as I am sure Professor Lamb has done, will know that I am the last person in the world to attempt ‘a broad assault on the place of literature in an historical understanding of the past’. It may well be that scurvy makes a blue sea seem green, and yet I see a green sea every day and I have never had scurvy. I am sure that’s true of large numbers of people, so how is it possible to argue that those who do are thus affected? The same sort of logic applies, though less conclusively, I agree, to what Professor Lamb says in his letter about Péron and Baudin.

If nineteen patients in Port Arthur hospital had scurvy, I really can’t see what that indicates about Australian colonial culture in general.

As for the character of the colonial governing class, the reliability of Bligh, of Bentham, and of the 1837 Select Committee has been discussed at length by Australian historians since the 1960s. I am sure that Professor Lamb knows about that discussion. I have been part of it, and while the subject is certainly not exhausted there is no room here to go over it again in anything like a useful way.

I am very sorry to be accused of laughing at scholarship. I was certainly not laughing at this book.

Condescending spin

Dear Editor,
I found Dennis Altman’s critical comments on my book Disposable Leaders (April 2017) condescending and vacuous. He lists a few books that I did not cite, without any indication that they would have changed any of the interpretations or arguments I put forward. He criticises the fact that I frequently cite leading journalists from the press gallery, without any indication of how using unspecified others would have changed or improved any understandings. He criticises the lack of attention to blogs, posts, tweets, and YouTube, without any indication of how these might have played an important role in the leadership coups I have examined.

In the chapter on Iatrogenic Spin Doctoring, I argue how the concern with spin is often self-defeating and further contributes to leadership instability. I titled one section the West Wing delusion, but, according to Altman, I do not say what this is. I begin by saying how I tired of the television show because it depicted a small group around a benign leader as the epicentre of political virtue and wisdom. In real life also, political leaders are increasingly surrounded by personally appointed staff. The way concern with spin leads to centralisation and control adds to this cocooning of the leader. However, in real life, the leader’s relations with the inner coterie cut across and complicate other political relationships, with ministers and MPs often feeling excluded, and hostage to the political judgements of the leader’s circle. I argue at some length that this factor was particularly important in the failures of Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. I can only think that these pages were missing from the copy of the book Altman had.

Rodney Tiffen, Tascott, NSW

Dennis Altman replies:

Rodney Tiffen is a distinguished political analyst, and I am sorry he is disappointed in my review. But I did expect him to pay more attention to the changing nature of the media landscape. As I wrote: ‘Tiberius’s telephone is now a smart device, and political leaders have full time staffers employed to engage with the virtual world.’ Are we to assume these staffers played no role in the intrigues that led to the downfall of our last three prime ministers?

Peeved moments

Dear Editor,
I’m puzzled by Alison Broinowski’s review of Bruce Grant’s memoir, Subtle Moments (April 2017). Broinowski essentially lists the events covered by Grant’s memoir. Throughout the page, her tone is rather terse – acidic – and I read on expecting an opinion or fact that would explain this tone, but it never comes. Broinowski seems peeved by Grant’s memoir, but she limits her reasons for it to her final brief sentence, ‘He still hasn’t.’

I would have been interested to know what it is about Bruce Grant’s book that annoys her so much.

Kym Houghton, Carisbrook, Vic.

Alison Broinowski replies:

In my review of Subtle Moments, far from being ‘peevish’ I paid Bruce Grant several well-deserved compliments as a man and as a writer. He invited readers to judge his claim that his life represented a biography of Australia, and I did so, pointing to what was missing. It was disappointing that such an authority could not resolve the ‘Australian dilemma’ which he himself identifies.

Trumpacious times

Dear Editor,
The April issue, in its article on that Elegant Fowl, Henry James, remarks that ‘We need all the humour and solace we can get in these trumpacious times.’ Too true. I’ll offer the following:

Susan Lever, in her review of the Bell Shakespeare production of Richard III, quotes ‘the famous speech’, Richard’s opening lines. She uses a spelling of ‘son’ that gives away Shakespeare’s pun and makes it clear that Richard is referring to Edward IV, rather than to the celestial body.

Does this give the Trumpians a new argument that anthropogenic climate change is not of relatively recent origin in human history?

Joseph Fernandez, Mosman, NSW

Minefield

Dear Editor,
Martin Zandvliet’s film Land of Mine (reviewed in ABR Arts) is not only about a disgrace – it is disgraceful. For a director to play with suspense of this type and degree is barbaric. I walked out, and I am surprised more people in James Dunk’s viewing didn’t do the same. One reviewer has even used the word ‘humane’. But despite a claim that the film might deter viewers from engaging in war, it is a monstrous experience to watch re-enactments of young boys picking away at landmines in order to defuse them, terrified that they will set them off, which is exactly what happens every so often. After two healthy bodies were blown to smithereens, I couldn’t believe that so-called civilised audience members would continue to subject themselves to such horror.

I’ll spend my time on anti-landmine projects instead.

C.V. Williams (online comment)

Roland Møller as Rasmussen in Land of Mine (Palace Films)

Beejay Silcox

Beejay SilcoxDear Editor,
I find Beejay Silcox’s writing refreshingly honest and very poignant, and look forward in anticipation to each of her articles and reviews. Her ‘Letter from America’ (September 2016) was outstanding and very prophetic. As with all literary critics, getting the right flavour in a response to a writer’s efforts is not an easy task, but the ease with which she dissects a text and provides an analysis of its content and context is exemplary. Accordingly, I look forward to more of her efforts.

Neil MacNeil (online comment)

‘Only in literary language can people understand our life and our condition.’

Refugee law and policies are subject to vociferous debate the world over as governments and societies grapple with the challenges of almost unprecedented global displacement. Yet the most relevant voices – those of refugees and asylum seekers themselves – are usually missing from these debates. We speak about refugees, perhaps even for refugees. Rarely are they afforded the opportunity to speak for themselves. Locked away in isolated detention facilities, or on remote Pacific islands, lives and experiences are reduced to a string of pernicious acronyms. People become IMAs (illegal maritime arrivals) and UMAs (unauthorised maritime arrivals). Children separated from their families are UAMs (unaccompanied minors). Adult men travelling alone are SAMs (single adult males), regardless of whether they have wives and children waiting for them elsewhere.

In They Cannot Take the Sky, thirty-five courageous authors reclaim their voices, reveal their lived experiences of Australia’s detention policies, and invite readers to recognise their humanity. In this powerful anthology, refugees and asylum seekers tell their stories, refusing to be silenced in the face of enormous physical and political pressures.

We admire it because it disdains to destroy us:
beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

Chagall’s falling man, a grandfather clock, a yellow
cow with a blue violin populate an allegory of terror

I was the greatest art potter
but only I knew it,
photographing myself holding signs that read
Unequalled, Unrivalled, and Undisputed

Gambling is part of Australia’s self-definition. The way we like to tell the story, lads at Gallipoli went over the top with a two-up kip in one hand and a rifle in the other, while exchanging tips for the Melbourne Cup. This national myth of betting derring-do, full of heroic punts and back-slapping celebrations, bears scant resemblance to the modern reality of Australian gambling. Our monumental annual gambling losses ($22.7 billion in 2014–15) flow, in large part, from solitary poker machine addicts feeding preposterous amounts of money into cacophonous machines.

In truth, ‘gambling’ is a misleading term for interaction with pokies. The machines keep a set percentage of money gambled, averaged over time. Use them long enough and it is guaranteed that all of your money will be taken. This is not just a safe bet, but a mathematically sure thing.

Gambling involves decisions about risk and reward based on calculated odds. Similarly, business is based on analysis of opportunities and threats, and backing the best plan necessary for growth. That is the theory. Operating a private enterprise effectively underwritten by public subsidy, benefiting from a mono-poly, and paying low rates of tax is a pipedream for most businesspeople. This, however, is the startling scenario in Tasmania, where Federal Hotels has made several hundred million dollars in profits through its pokie monopoly. In Losing Streak, historian James Boyce provides a vast amount of evidence to demonstrate that the company has been the recipient of outrageously favourable treatment for almost half a century. His language is never loose, and he leaves the reader to decide just how strong the stench of corruption is, but asserts, ‘The relationship between successive Tasmanian governments and Federal Hotels became a cornerstone of a system of crony capitalism that has distorted public policy for decades.’

The historian Rebe Taylor has a fascination with Australia’s southern islands and their capacity to contain or magnify issues of identity for their indigenous inhabitants, if not for their broader populations. Her first book, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (2012), traced the forgotten story of the Tasmanian Aboriginal women taken there by British and American sealers during the early nineteenth century and the subsequent history of their families. Taylor was able to weave her journey of detection together with the islanders’ own hunches and clues as to their families’ misty origins. She was well aware that behind this remarkable story of retrieval loomed a darker tale of loss, violence, and guilt, centred on the island of Tasmania itself. Into the heart of Tasmania would be her next assignment.

To characterise Tasmanian Aboriginal and colonial history as fraught is a clear understatement, for even expressions of anguish at the devastating effects of colonial violence can draw sharp responses from Aboriginal descendants resentful of the implication that, like their ancestors, they also have been made to disappear through the ‘device’ of extinction. This potent element of identity formation and the identification of research-based enquiry with colonialism have become framing concerns in recent Tasmanian historiography. It accounts for the particular style of this book, and one has to admire Taylor’s intrepid and creative research methodology, which sees her combine the biography of a high eccentric with an exploration of contemporary Tasmanian identity politics. She achieves this neatly enough by displacing the role of problematic interrogator to the anachronistic figure of Ernest Westlake himself, but perhaps not without cost.

Australia’s national identity is as complex as the people who make up the nation and the historical forces by which it was made. Our Indigenous peoples, whose unique histories precede the nation’s by more than fifty thousand years, are central to that identity. A century ago, making those statements would have been virtually unthinkable to most, such was the dominance of exclusionary colonial bigotry. For the mind-space to experience national identity more inclusively, we in the modern era owe much to the extra-ordinary activism of those peoples after World War II. From a deeply comparative and historical perspective, this book narrates and celebrates that activism, which has occurred not only in Australia but also in Canada and New Zealand.

Miranda Johnson is a lecturer in history at the University of Sydney. We have here her auspicious first book, The Law Is Our History: Indigeneity, law, and the settler state, which is ambitious in scope, yet readable and concise in style. It is based on years of research and several extensive periods of scholarship-supported residence in the states concerned. To read this book is to engage with three important interrelated themes: the common historical forces by which the Commonwealth settler-states were made; the impact of colonialism upon the social and political organisation of their indigenous peoples; and how the modern activism of those peoples has reshaped and is reshaping those states.

The Last Resort (1986), a photobook by Martin Parr, includes a photograph of a woman sunbaking in the English seaside resort of New Brighton. The woman is lying, facedown and topless, on a concrete ramp, directly in front of the caterpillar tracks of a gigantic excavator. Beside her, a young girl plays with a red plastic bucket. As with so many of Parr’s images, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Certainly, one can note the woman’s faith in the vehicle’s brakes.

I was haunted by this picture of English recreation as I read Robert Dessaix’s stylish contemplation on leisure, The Pleasures of Leisure. The seemingly redundant title of Dessaix’s book implies the oxymoronic possibility of unpleasurable leisure, but – unlike Parr – Dessaix does not dwell on that possibility. Dessaix’s work is for ‘general readers’, and while it makes passing references to some late-model theorists of leisure (such as ‘humourless’  Theodor Adorno), it largely bypasses the field of Leisure Studies that emerged in the 1970s. Nevertheless, Dessaix isn’t blind to the workings of class, gender, capital, and race (ideology, in other words) in the production and consumption of leisure.

Visiting the actor Simon Gleeson in 2014 a few months after he was cast as Jean Valjean in a new production of Les Misérables, I was startled by the bulked-up friend who met me from the train. ‘What the hell?’ I asked. ‘I have to lift a cart,’ he replied. It is not a bad exegesis of Victor Hugo’s sprawling novel and the musical it gave rise to. And it is an anecdote that would probably delight David Bellos. ‘Muscular strength,’ Bellos writes of Valjean, ‘acrobatic skills learned in prison and an ability to tolerate pain allow him to release Fauchelevent from under his cart, to climb the convent wall, to escape from the hold-up and to carry Marius through the sewers.’ Each of these events is pivotal to Hugo’s story (though there is no episode at the convent wall in the musical) and requires of Valjean the sort of muscularity that is immediately evident to both readers and audiences – hence Simon’s physical transformation.

In her introduction to Edge of Irony, Marjorie Perloff claims that in order to ‘understand Modernism ... we have to read, more closely than we have, the deeply ironic war literature of the defunct, multicultural, and polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire’. To that end, she compiles a series of essays that focus on writers who lived through and were lastingly influenced by, the final throes of the Habsburg Empire, in each case fusing biographical detail, historical context, and close textual readings.

Perloff’s selection criteria has as much to do with literary advocacy as with her subject’s cultural significance: she has selected writers who, she says, have either been marginalised or misread by English- and German-language readers and scholars. She notes that ‘Outside of German departments ... I find that as major a literary figure as Karl Kraus is virtually unknown.’ The same can be said for Joseph Roth, and while Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1943) ‘is known by name as a long and difficult novel ... few people have actually read Musil’. That cannot be said about Paul Celan, but Perloff argues, convincingly, that Celan is too narrowly construed as a Holocaust poet by his admirers. She therefore reads him ‘against the grain ... as a love poet, whose lyrics ... can best be understood in the context of the lost empire’.

‘I write best from place,’ Catherine McKinnon told Fairfax newspapers in a recent interview. Her second novel, which concerns centuries of human interaction with the New South Wales coast region between Wollongong and Lake Illawarra, makes this abundantly clear.

Storyland  ’s tendrils extend as far back as 1796 and as far forward as 2033 and 2717, though the latter is glimpsed mostly in the subtext. Four different settings are established in chronological order and then revisited in the reverse order following the centrepiece section. Through these enormous leaps in time, McKinnon observes what is fleeting in people’s lives and enduring in the landscape that surrounds (and sustains) them: ‘We’re part of their story, not the other way around,’ one character remarks of the longevity of the nearby lake and trees.

There is much to like about a well-executed set of short stories, and this is true of Jean Harley Was Here. While the book presents itself as a novel, it has more in common with Elizabeth Strout’s multi-narrator linked collection Olive Kitteridge (2008). This structural choice gives Heather Taylor Johnson enormous opportunity to explore the many aspects of grief.

Jean Harley hasn’t died – yet. Although the cover blurb refers to ‘the people [Jean] leaves behind’, her death remains a mere possibility until a third of the way through the book. There is a resignation to these early chapters: although Jean might wake up, her friends and family seem to regard her demise as inevitable and are going through the motions until it happens. We are introduced to her husband, Stan, and their son, Orion. We meet Jean’s best friends, two women who have only known one another in the context of Jean; Stan’s mother; and Charley, an ex-con who has set the whole fiasco in motion with his van.

A Hundred Small Lessons holds powerful truths, simply told. It is a story of parenthood and place, where small domestic moments, rather than dramatic public displays, are the links between people, the present and the past. Each moment occurs in and around a familiar, ordinary Brisbane house, and the book begins when Elsie, the nonagenarian resident, leaves this house for a nursing home, and Lucy and Ben move in with their son Tom.

To summarise the plot would not explain this novel. One domestic moment is layered on the next, exploring the ways in which parenthood works on identity through time – that parenthood is not created through the drama of birth but through the small domestic actions of daily care. That a crow dies, that a phone is lost, is not the point. How Lucy and Elsie, and their respective husbands Ben and Clem, choose to behave in these moments, is. These moments are woven through the book’s different time periods, of Lucy’s ‘now’ and Elsie’s ‘then’.

Peter Polites’s first novel is remarkable in its power to evoke growing up caught between conflicting cultural and sexual identities. It tells the story of Bux, a gay man haunted by his addiction to painkillers, his abusive relationship with his drug-dealing bodybuilder boyfriend, his violent alcoholic Greek father, and a childhood where his sexuality and his traditional Greek upbringing mark him forever as an outsider. The novel pulses with the frenetic life of Sydney’s western suburbs, where cultures, peoples, and languages clash. As Bux moves across the city, the stark disparity between Sydney’s multicultural west and monocultural east becomes a central theme.

The collapse of a bridge is the catalyst in Cassandra Austin’s All Fall Down, isolating the small town of Mululuk in true Australian gothic fashion. Janice, crossing the bridge to flee her husband Craig and reunite with former lover Shane – or maybe not – manages to survive the fall, waking from a coma weeks later with a head injury people aren’t sure she isn’t faking. Charlie prays over her, not necessarily for her survival, while Father Nott and Gussy prepare to protest the government’s refusal to open the new bridge until Richard, who may or may not be an insurance assessor, is satisfied he knows what caused the first one to fail. Father Nott’s teenage niece Rachel is thrust into the middle of everything. Banished to Mululuk by her father, self-absorbed Rachel is oblivious to the shimmering tensions, lies, and half-truths that cloud Mululuk’s air as densely as the red dirt of the desert surrounding it.

In this gripping first novel, Sarah Schmidt re-imagines the lives of Lizzie Borden, her family, and the brutal double murder of her father and stepmother, for which Lizzie became notorious. Set in and around the Borden’s house at Fall River, Massachusetts, the narrative has a dense, claustrophobic air that feeds the portrayal of this family as menacingly close.

The novel moves backwards and forwards in time between 3 August 1892 – the day before the murders – and the days immediately after. Following an increasingly familiar structure (found, for instance, in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap [2008] and Josephine Rowe’s A Loving, Faithful Animal [2016]), the narrative is related from several points of view, the chapters alternating between first-person accounts from Lizzie, her older sister, Emma, the family’s maid, Bridget, and Benjamin, a violent young man engaged by the sisters’ (frankly creepy) Uncle John to ‘talk some sense’ into Mr Borden.

In her novel Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes ... and addressed themselves to the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.’

Christina Stead’s desk contained not only sheets of typing paper but also ‘a stack of airletters’ which she used to reach out to relatives, friends, and acquaintances in distant countries. The first letters reproduced in A Web of Friendship were written in 1928, soon after she arrived in England. It was then that she met Bill Blake, who was to be her companion for almost forty years. The volume ends in 1973, a few years after Blake died and shortly before Stead returned to Australia. In 1964 she wrote, ‘I have lived in so many places, met so many people and lived in other people’s worlds.’ Her letters document her friendships with many of those people and her observations of places ranging from Paris, New York, and London to Santa Fe, Canberra, and Lausanne.

The UWAP Poetry imprint began in late 2016, and there are already fourteen titles available. To judge from the quality of the three reviewed here, UWAP’s energy and ambition is well-placed.

In the first of these books, A Personal History of Vision ($22.99 pb, 100 pp, 9781742589381), Luke Fischer, in his poem ‘Why I Write’, provides a useful starting point. After rejecting a number of familiar reasons for writing poetry – each with a short, ambivalent mea culpa – Fischer eventually offers us the line: ‘I write for the expansion of the present.’

A Personal History of Vision, Fischer’s second collection, goes on to ‘expand the present’ in many different ways, some of them highly poetic and others more philosophical. As many people, including the publishers, have pointed out, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke is a considerable influence on Fischer, especially on the latter’s brand of metaphysics, which is vivid, persuasive, and non-doctrinal. Often these moments or epiphanies are ‘expanded’ from the present – sometimes from landscapes or personal encounters, sometimes ekphrastically from well-known paintings.

Northrop Frye wrote that ‘No kind of book is easier to attack than an anthology’, as Stephen Burt reminds us in the introduction to The Poem Is You: 60 contemporary American poems and how to read them. Frye’s comment was occasioned by an anthology of poems from his native Canada, but in recent years perhaps no national literature has borne out the truth of it more than that of the United States, where poetry anthologies have occasioned impassioned debates turning on the most fundamental questions of aesthetics and politics, inclusion and exclusion. Burt’s contribution to the genre, which collects sixty poems written or published since 1980, is less an attempt to refigure an existing canon in one direction or other than to record the salutary aftermath of the canon wars, that is, the ever-increasing diversity of American poetry: diversity in the identities of American poets, and diversity in the kinds of poems they write.

Beyond the Vapour Trail, a memoir-cum-travel book spanning six continents, concerns the author’s experiences as an aid worker for non-government organisations such as World Vision. Brett Pierce’s work involves researching and setting up community projects, and adapting and remodelling child sponsorship programs. He describes it as ‘sitting down with these communities to explore the causes of poverty and to pursue their dreams for a better life’.

Described in one of the blurbs on its back cover as ‘a cabinet of wonders for lovers of faraway countries,’ Jamie James’s The Glamour of Strangeness is unusual in terms of the wide variety of the material it covers. James focuses here on artists who left their homelands ‘to create a new self in a new place’, arguing that the ‘exotic’ aesthetics wrought by these adventurous exiles resulted in them becoming personae non gratae in their native lands.

As James tells us in his preface, this book began as ‘a dual study of Raden Saleh, the Javanese painter who enjoyed a season of fame in Europe, and Walter Spies, the dreamy German artist in Bali’. However, he also explains that ‘as the book progressed, other, similar cases presented themselves that seemed too good to leave out,’ with the result that we are also introduced here to a much more extensive cast, including Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss writer who roamed the Sahara; American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren in Haiti; and Victor Segalen, a Breton naval doctor who emigrated to Peking to immerse himself in classical Chinese civilisation. At the time of his death in 1919, Segalen was working on an ‘Essay on Exoticism’, which he subtitled ‘An Aesthetics of Diversity’, and it is a similar kind of ambition to place the ‘exote’ within a broad intellectual framework that provides the rationale for James’s book.

Looking back on his career, Noel Tovey writes: ‘I could work in three languages. I had dined in the finest restaurants in Europe and America with pop stars and royalty and I had a career in the theatre that most Australians would envy.’ The man who wrote these words grew up an abused and neglected child. When he was seventeen, he served time in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison for ‘the abominable crime of buggery’, a fact not always mentioned in online references.

Tovey began life as a dancer in Melbourne. In 1960 he went to London where he became a successful performer, director, and art dealer. Tovey is also Aboriginal. Part of London’s appeal for him was the relief it offered from the relentless racism of the Australia of his youth. His own reconciliation, with his return to Australia in 1990, and his exploration of his own Aboriginal ancestry, is central to his story. Thirteen years ago Tovey published a memoir, Little Black Bastard (Hodder, 2004) which became the basis for a one-man show, staged in a number of cities. (Aged eighty-two, Tovey will reprise it at La Mama Theatre in early May 2017.) And Then I Found Me, a sequel to that book, covers the thirty years during which Tovey built a successful career in London.

When Oliver Sacks began seeing Bill Hayes in 2009, he had never been in a relationship. He wasn’t out as a gay man and hadn’t had sex for thirty-five years. Sacks, the celebrated author and neurologist, was almost thirty years older than Hayes, who had moved to New York from San Francisco after the sudden death of his partner. The two visited the Museum of Natural History and went for walks in the Bronx botanical garden, where Sacks could expatiate on every species of fern. When Hayes gave Sacks a long, exploratory kiss on his seventy-sixth birthday, the older man looked utterly surprised. ‘Is that what kissing is?’ he asked. ‘Or is that something you’ve invented?’

Hayes’s luminous memoir, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and me, is full of such startling questions. For Sacks’s mind – erudite, deeply scientific, yet with a childlike sense of wonder – must now process the mysteries of love. He caresses his lover’s biceps: ‘they’re like ... beautiful tumours’. As he watches Hayes do his daily push-ups, he counts them by naming the elements: titanium, vanadium, chromium. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could dream together?’ he asks Hayes one night in bed.

Among the glittering generation of pioneering aviators and aviatrixes of the 1920s and 1930s, Jessie ‘Chubbie’ Miller stands out as remarkably adventurous. Carol Baxter’s highly readable biography provides an engaging portrait of a young suburban housewife who decided, quite literally, to make her own way in the world. As Baxter acknowledges, for a biographer it is a tremendous story that just keeps on giving. This book does it justice.

Born in 1901 in a small town located at the end of a railway line that stretched almost 400 kilometres from Perth, itself the most remote capital city in the world, Jessie Beveridge moved with her family in 1906 to the bright lights of Broken Hill. Her provincial upbringing was constrained all the more by the conservative religious views of her parents, who expected their daughter’s destiny to consist of marriage and motherhood.

In 1784 Immanuel Kant wrote a remarkable essay entitled ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ The essay, written for a magazine, provided an occasion for the great and difficult philosopher to present some of his ideas to a broader audience. The essay is short, accessible, and contains breezy descriptions of freedom, rationality, and human dignity. Kant’s answer is that enlightenment consists in acquiring the capacity to think for oneself, rather than outsourcing one’s thinking to others. Kant writes: ‘It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.’

There is something exhilarating about the idea that intellectual and moral maturity are attainable, and that the road that leads there can only be travelled by the courageous. Perhaps this explains the Enlightenment’s special allure for people who are interested in exploring the world of ideas.

A persistent fascination attaches to those who help break the new wood, and so it is with Bernard Smith (1916–2011). His contribution is foundational to the study of the arts in Australia. Smith was for more than sixty years the country’s leading art historian, but he was also an educator, curator, newspaper critic, collector, memoirist, and biographer. Even as an artist his work has acquired an aura of significance. When I was last at the National Gallery of Australia, one of the large and rather tenebrous canvases he painted in the early 1940s was hanging alongside work by James Gleeson as an example of early Australian surrealism.

The Legacies of Bernard Smith arose from a series of symposia held at the University of Melbourne and the Power Institute in 2012, a year after Smith’s death at the age of ninety-four. There are twenty-one chapters in all, covering many and various topics. It is an interesting collection, but I suspect that we still don’t have a clear vantage on Smith’s long and distinguished career, and that there is much more to say about his influence.

In July 1986, an ascendant Midnight Oil joined forces with the Northern Territory’s trailblazing, predominantly Indigenous Warumpi Band and embarked on the joint Blackfella–Whitefella tour of remote Indigenous communities in the Western Desert and Top End. The bands would perform for more than a dozen communities, from Warakurna, Western Australia in the south-west to Groote Eylandt on the Gulf of Carpentaria to the north-east, taking in, among other places, the Pintupi community of Kintore; the Luritja, Warlpiri, Anmatjira and Aranda settlement (and Warumpi Band home-ground) of Papunya, and the Gumatj centre of Yirrkala. Strict Rules is then-music journalist Andrew McMillan’s breathless, kaleidoscopic account of that tour. Originally published in 1988, the book is reissued here to coincide with Midnight Oil’s The Great Circle world tour, and includes a new epilogue from frontman Peter Garrett.

When the Oils and Warumpis hit Docker River, the Fraser government’s historic Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976) was barely a decade old. Indigenous rejection of a century of missionary round-ups, forced settlement, and decades-old policies of assimilation was a recent development. The Northern Territory into which Midnight Oil plunged headlong was the site of a nascent sovereignty movement agitating against the twin-colossi of mining and militarisation. The Cold War still loomed large, and US forces were an uneasy presence in the Territory. The bands’ entry into many of the tour’s stopping points required that they first obtain permits from the relevant community councils.

Steven Spielberg may be the most beloved filmmaker alive, but this has rarely stopped critics from patronising him. ‘Such moods as alienation and melancholia have no place in his films,’ the New Yorker’s David Denby wrote on the occasion of Spielberg’s seventieth birthday – a sweeping claim that could hardly be more wrong. In truth, these moods have always been central to Spielberg’s unsettling Romantic vision. Think of the telephone linesman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) yearning to escape his family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); the trick-or-treaters roaming suburbia at sunset in E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial (1982); and all the Lost Boys – and sometimes girls – who wander through subsequent films from Empire of the Sun (1987) to Catch Me If You Can (2002) to The BFG (2016).

Happily, Molly Haskell is a more sensitive observer than Denby. Steven Spielberg: A life in films has the virtue of paying attention to the films themselves, not merely to their maker’s public image as a cheery, wholesome entertainer. This is doubly impressive considering that Haskell has never been an ardent fan. In her introduction to this compact book, she admits to doubting whether she was the best writer for the job,  given that Spielberg’s ‘great subjects – children, adolescents – and genres – science fiction, fantasy, horror, action-adventure – were stay-away zones for me’. This is an understandable statement coming from Haskell, a pioneering feminist film critic best-known as the author of the classic study From Reverence to Rape (1974), which belongs on every buff’s bookshelf. Far from sharing Spielberg’s boyish interest in gizmos and extraterrestrials, Haskell regards such fixations as straightforward symptoms of arrested development, grounded in fear of adulthood and especially of adult relationships with women.

What was your pathway to publishing?

I was about to land a cadetship with The Age, or so I thought. When I missed out, I applied for a job as a publishing assistant with Cambridge University Press. Before long I was working in CUP’s Sydney office, a terrace in Surry Hills. Bits of crumbling wall would fall onto our desks, so manuscripts were often covered in sand. It has always been a glamorous industry, but one I’m very glad I fell into.

What was the first book you published?

An arcane legal studies book, the name of which I can’t remember – not such an auspicious start. But I do remember the second or third: Tom Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia (1996) – an early career highlight, and a book that made me realise what Australian history could be.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Structural editing, yes; copyediting, no.

Why do you write?

Louis Nowra (photograph by Adam Knott)If I knew the answer to that I probably wouldn’t write.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I know I dream, but all I remember are my nightmares.

Where are you happiest?

When Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française appeared in 2004, it was a huge success, in France and throughout the English-speaking world as well. Its account of France’s collapse at the beginning of World War II, and its portrayal of the early part of the German Occupation, are now acknowledged as profoundly insightful and of an epic scope matched by few other writers. In addition, the story of the quasi-miraculous survival of the uncompleted manuscript, purportedly kept for fifty years in a suitcase by the daughter of the author who had perished in Auschwitz, provided an almost mythical aura to the Némirovsky phenomenon.

The enthusiasm generated by what appeared to be the discovery of a ‘new’ major author was soon to be tempered by other revelations. Némirovsky, between the wars, had been not just a recognised novelist, but a commercially successful and critically fêted star. The problems were that many of the author’s closest literary associates were later tarnished by collaborationist activities or tendencies, and that much of her work, including her most famous novel, David Golder (1929), was intensely critical of Jews and Jewishness. This provoked a still-heated debate about whether Némirovsky – a Russian Jewish immigrant in France, and a Shoah victim – was anti-Semitic, a Jew-hating Jew.

Nobody could be more qualified to bring balanced understanding to this debate than Susan Rubin Suleiman. Harvard professor, and author of many books on topics including women’s writing, the place of ideology in fiction, issues concerned with Jewishness (including her own), and the literature, politics, and memory of World War II in France, Suleiman harnesses all her expertise and experience to reflect on what she calls the ‘Némirovsky question’. This is an authoritative work, beautifully written, though not without its moments of uncertainty.

For the Némirovsky question, far from being a single one, turns out to be a multitude of interlocking enigmas, puzzles, and complexities, few of which make for easy resolution. Some of them have to do with the many paradoxes in Némirovsky’s own character: for example, the fearlessness and skill with which, as a foreign woman in France’s snobbish and male-dominated literary field, she built her career as a writer – as against the apparent blindness and passivity with which she failed to secure her own and her family’s safety when the need to do so had become obvious. Why did she not apply earlier for French citizenship? Was her 1939 conversion to Catholicism merely a tardy attempt to escape discrimination, or was she genuinely seeking a greater sense of spiritual belonging? How could she have declared her admiration for Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s first and most violent anti-Semitic tract, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937)? Did she really think that a personal appeal to Pétain to exempt her and her family from Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws could succeed? Suleiman does not provide definitive answers to such questions, but she examines them with the patience and rigour characteristic of the best scholarship.

Another strand of investigation illuminates the social and political history of France in the 1920s and 1930s, when the rise of totalitarianism in both the east and the west drove hundreds of thousands into France to seek refuge, reigniting traditional anti-Semitism, and provoking a broader surge in xenophobic and racist sentiment, not least among the well-to-do and established French Jewish community. How this situation evolved into France’s shameful and willing wartime deportation of so many of its Jews to the Nazi death camps is documented and analysed with lucidity, but also in a way that suggests disturbing analogies between the forces at work in Némirovsky’s world and those confronting present-day readers.

Irène Némirovsky and her parents and maternal grandparents, 1922 (Némirovsky papers, IMEC archive)

Pulsing beneath these individual and socio-political dimensions is the deepest question of all for Suleiman, that of Jewish identity and destiny. Through Némirovsky, Suleiman probes at the experience of Jewishness as race, culture, and religion, proposing the disquieting view that no Jew can ever really cease to be a foreigner or a stranger in the country where he or she chooses to live: ingrained anxiety and fear from the long experience of persecution and ongoing discrimination, exponentially sharpened by the horrors of the Shoah, have become inescapable and unerasable facts of Jewish life. Is this indeed the case? As a non-Jewish reader, I do not feel competent to judge; but I do not doubt the authenticity of Suleiman’s testimony.

Irène Némirovsky, 1938 (photograph by Roger-Viollet, the Roger-Violett Archive)While neither a biography nor a literary study in itself, The Némirovsky Question contains enough about Némirovsky’s life and work to provide a sound introduction for those who do not yet know her. There are also many useful clarifications and corrections to commonly held misapprehensions, including the intriguing but false story of the manuscript in the suitcase. Like her character Ada in Les chiens et les loups (1940, translation The Dogs and the Wolves, 2009), Némirovsky searched endlessly for ‘the secrets hidden beneath sad faces and dark skies’, and this search, as Suleiman shows, produced a body of work that, whatever its problematic aspects, has enduring literary merit. But Suleiman’s most compelling contribution is her positioning of Némirovsky as an emblematic figure in the context of much of the last century of French cultural life. The personal trajectory of the female writer – famed, forgotten, rediscovered; her tragic fate as a foreign Jew; her legacy as the mother of two daughters who both became writers and founded families that now appear to be successfully integrated into the tapestry of contemporary French society: these themes are developed against the background of a France that struggled unsuccessfully to rebuild itself after World War I, and tried to bury the shame and guilt of its official collaborationism in World War II by excising the Vichy period from its history. With impressive erudition, Suleiman demonstrates that the re-emergence of Némirovsky as a writer to be reckoned with is integral to the process by which the French – novelists and historians first, then more slowly the politicians, educators, and public – have finally begun to come to more truthful terms with their past.

In his most recent book, Woolloomooloo: A biography, author and playwright Louis Nowra sets out to discover why the word ‘Woolloomooloo’ is still ‘a shorthand for notoriety, social despair and criminality’. Eschewing conventional historical method, he undertakes his research from the ground up, walking the sixty-three streets of that much-maligned suburb just east of the Sydney CBD. With a nod to Baudelaire, he describes himself as a flâneur, someone who observes the life of a city while exploring it on foot. It proves to be a very effective method.

The narrative is divided into four strands: memoir, history, the suburb’s major streets, and recurring themes. This structure, with chapters alternating between the present and the past, highlights one of Nowra’s main themes, namely, the indelible impact of Woolloomooloo’s past upon its present.