In Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006), Girlie claims, ‘If you ever want to find out about anything in your vicinity, you have to talk to the mad people.’ There are a lot of mad people in Wright’s biography of Aboriginal activist, thinker, and provocateur ‘Tracker’ Tilmouth. He is probably the maddest of all, in the Kerouacian sense of ‘mad to live, mad to talk’, but, according to his mate Doug Turner, his ‘madness gave him sanity’.

To complement our 2017 ‘Books of the Year’, we invited several senior publishers to nominate their favourite books – all published by other companies.

Madonna Duffy

Two Australian novels have stayed with me through 2017: Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in ABR, 1/17) was brilliant in every way. Challenging and engrossing, it reminded me that it takes courage to live well. Rose is such a keen observer of human nature in all its tortured forms. It also featured Sandy Cull’s gorgeous design work on the cover, so anything within had to be worth reading. Kim Scott’s Taboo (Picador, 8/17) asks the questions that many of us are asking ourselves. How do we make a shared future out of a fractured past? He reminds us that the power of Indigenous storytelling transcends time, race, and politics. They were the first storytellers, and we still have so much to learn from them.

Madonna Duffy is Publishing Director at the University of Queensland Press.

Michael Heyward

Philippe Paquet’s monumental biography of the sinologist Pierre Ryckmans is entitled Simon Leys: Navigator between worlds (La Trobe University Press/Black Inc.). Superbly translated by Julie Rose, this book explores an extraordinary life. Ryckmans was born in Belgium, where he trained in art history but wanted to become a painter. He first went to China when he was nineteen. Later, he became a scathing critic of Mao and Maoism, writing under the nom de plume Simon Leys, before landing up in Australia where he raised his family, and wrote his unclassifiable masterpiece The Death of Napoleon, along with the masterful essays that were collected in The Hall of Uselessness.

Michael Heyward is Publisher at Text Publishing.

Meredith Curnow

Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come (Allen & Unwin, 10/17) is a quietly brilliant piece of work that left me rather sad at the end, but happily so. The hopeful and abiding love of Bunty and Christabel will long stay with me. The intent of the novel is clear from Part I, The Fictive Self. We all tell ourselves stories and ignore or reinterpret what is too hard to digest. Confronting, cutting, moving, and funny in equal parts. Long may this storyteller continue to absorb fact into her fiction.

Meredith Curnow is Publisher – Knopf, Vintage, Penguin Random House Literary.

Phillipa McGuinness

I was hopeful that Dennis Glover’s The Last Man in Europe (Black Inc.) would be free of the ‘clunky philosophical dialogue that made the protagonists sound like Marxist gramophones’, a criticism Glover has Orwell direct at another writer. I hoped too that Glover’s prose might hold its own alongside one of the century’s greatest writers. It exceeded my hopes on both counts. I can’t read or publish enough about Sydney it seems. Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney (Giramondo, 1/18) was a joy. It made me want to set off to find the Wrigleys factory in Hornsby, such is its power to make the marginal and the lost seem much less so.

Phillipa McGuinness is Executive Publisher of NewSouth Publishing.

Mathilda Imlah

For me this year, Stuart Kells’s The Library: A catalogue of wonders (Text Publishing, 12/17) is an easy choice for any bibliophile. On a vivid tour of the world’s great libraries, both real and imagined, Kells is a magnificent guide to the abundant treasures he sets out. In fiction, Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman (Hachette, 12/17) is a powerful and skilful novel – I could mention speculative fiction, but it transcends that tag. It offers a vision of Australia’s future and past whose twist, quite as intended, took me completely by surprise.

Mathilda Imlah is the Picador Publisher.

Barry Scott

Increasingly, international publishers are the the first to publish books by Australian writers. As the wealth of local talent grows, it is probably inevitable that some authors will bob up elsewhere. Peter Barry’s The Walk (New Internationalist), a delicious satire, tells the story of a charity worker who brings Mujtabaa, a young Ethiopian man, to London and has him walk from Heathrow to Trafalgar Square to raise funds for famine relief. The hilarious McDonald’s scene is worth the price of admission alone. I found Bram Presser’s The Book of Dirt (Text Publishing, 11/17) impossible to forget. Penetrating, soulful, and surprisingly welcoming, it reminded me of my own ancestors and how easy it is to sidestep the past.

Barry Scott is Publisher at Transit Lounge

Rachel Bin Salleh

It is unusual to read a short story and feel the kind of satisfaction that comes with finishing a great novel. I felt this about each one of Tony Birch’s stories in Common People (UQP, 9/17). In this collection, Birch reveals himself as a master of the short story. He draws you in from the first paragraph and leaves you both satisfied and with cause for reflection. The stories are surprising and diverse, and Birch’s sense of humanity pulls you in. I loved the grittiness, the dark humour, and quiet celebration of human resilience.

Rachel Bin Salleh is Publisher at Magabala Books.

Rod Morrison

Jane Rawson is one of our most gifted and unpredictable – and under-appreciated – writers. I really enjoyed her fourth novel, From the Wreck (Transit Lounge, 4/17), a densely poetic, imaginary tour de force that combines seemingly familiar scenes and characters – an historical shipwreck – with surreal and speculative leaps of fancy. Overseas, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner) by Jesmyn Ward is a spare and searing portrait of just a few of the countless faultlines at the heart of American society. A dysfunctional family drama and modern road novel in one, it is painful, shocking, and illuminating reading, but you dare not turn away.

Rod Morrison is Publishing Director at Brio Books.

Nikki Christer

The one that got away! This year I devoured Chris Womersley’s rich and gothic City of Crows (Picador, 10/17). With each very different novel Womersley exposes the wanton sides of human nature, and looks for beauty. This dark, visceral book is a brilliant piece of historical fiction. Rural France and Paris, scenes familiar to us from centuries of fiction, are drawn here in many layers. I particularly enjoyed wallowing in the blood and magic of the underground rooms and clusters of trees where most writers do not linger. Charlotte’s quest to save herself and Nicolas stretched the imagination of this reader in the most enjoyable ways.

Nikki Christer is Group Publishing Director at Penguin Random House

Georgia Richter

Two portraits of writers provided excellent reading this year. Thornton McCamish’s Our Man Elsewhere: In search of Alan Moorehead (Black Inc., 9/16), an ‘in the footsteps’ narrative, returns a legendary war correspondent to public view, revealing an author whose wit and self-deprecation make him an ideal companion on the discovery journey. Helen Garner’s writing has influenced my teaching and thinking about style like no other. In A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (Text, 5/17), Bernadette Brennan offered fresh perspectives with her thorough, immensely readable portrait of one of Australia’s finest authors.

Georgia Richter is Publisher at Fremantle Press.

About halfway through this thick biography of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz (and halfway through the century of horrors that his life experiences uncannily track and are witness to) came a passage that stopped me dead.

In the spring of 1943, on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the outskirts of Warsaw, standing on the balcony, we could hear screaming from the ghetto. The screaming was the sound of people being murdered ... The screaming gave us goose-pimples ... We did not look each other in the eye.

It is hard to look those words in the eye. The occasion was the mass murder of the last Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Two or three hundred thousand had already gone to the extermination camps; many thousands who remained fought to the death against the Germans. I hadn’t read this passage before in any of Miłosz’s extensive prose writings. It wasn’t included in The Captive Mind (1953), his superb book about the accommodations and cowardices of artists and intellectuals living under totalitarianism, but that book was more concerned with the monstrous regimes of the left than of the right.

‘Leir the sonne of Baldud, was admitted ruler over the Britaines, in the year of the world 3105’ (Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1577). Shakespeare’s play King Lear is set in the long ago, the age of ballads and folktales. ‘Amongst those things that nature gave ...’ goes the ballad King Leir and His Three Daughters. The sea and the storm, beauty, generation, crops, weeds, sex, suffering, death: King Lear deals in those things that nature gave – time unredeemed.

‘The long years we spent plunged in the Cold War made losers of us all,’ Mikhail Gorbachev lamented after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By then, Gorbachev was unequivocally a loser himself – out of power and soon to be Russia’s least popular former leader, with ratings far lower than Stalin’s.

Americans do not share the sentiment that the Cold War was a net loss. They experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the magical disappearance of their Soviet enemy as victory and vindication. Odd Arne Westad, however, eschews any notion of the Cold War as a triumph. A Norwegian-born historian whose recent appointment at Harvard was preceded by a long career in Europe, Westad has long been one of the most persuasive advocates of the view that the Cold War was a tragedy for much of humanity, above all for those in the unfortunate battlegrounds where millions of lives were lost.

Few organisations defend their reputation more vigorously than the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Long since clasped to the national bosom, the ADF has no intention of being shoehorned out of its prized position at the heart of Australian identity and culture. The first duty of its public affairs personnel is to protect the brand – a brand, it believes, is fragile and under constant assault. In reality, the ADF’s reputation is virtually unbreakable. At one point during 2011 there were six separate investigations running simultaneously into various aspects of ADF culture, including inquiries into personal conduct within the ADF, the use of alcohol, the treatment of women at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) and in the ADF more broadly. Sparked by the ADFA Skype Sex Scandal, the investigations laid bare a toxic culture of misogyny, bullying, and abuse. What damage did this scarifying experience inflict on the ADF’s standing in the eyes of the public? In February 2012, while new allegations of abuse were still surfacing, Essential Research asked its polling sample ‘How much trust do you have in the following national institutions?’ The ADF came in top, well ahead of the Federal Police, the Federal and High Courts, ASIO, the Reserve Bank, and the Commonwealth Public Service.

Has the Australian prime minister’s job become impossible? The authors of The Pivot of Power: Australian prime ministers and political leadership 1949–2016 ask this question at the very end of their book. They conclude on an almost utopian note, one rather out of keeping with the otherwise judicious tone maintained over 300 pages: ‘a new dawn will arrive’.

Sadly, the optimism of Paul Strangio, Paul ‘t Hart and James Walter on this point is founded on their historical observation of previous reinvigoration of the office, and not anything that has come to pass during the prime ministerships of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, or Malcolm Turnbull. Most of what the authors tell us in their account of the office since John Howard’s political demise belies their eventual optimism. But they do help us to see that the issue is not that we have suffered an unusually long run of duds; the problems are rather inherent in the evolution of the role of prime minister.

Plenty of novelists begin life as poets. Few, though, have managed to maintain their status as poet–novelists quite so impressively as David Malouf. But even Malouf, in his ‘middle period’, more or less dropped poetry for his ‘big’ novels – The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993), and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) – before a late return to poetry, kicked off with Typewriter Music (2007). Perhaps appropriately, the last novel that Malouf has so far published, Ransom (2009), is based on a poem: Homer’s Iliad.

All of this suggests that Yvonne Smith, in this welcome study of Malouf’s early writings, has picked up on a pertinent theme (‘the poetic’) to apply to her subject. Smith’s study covers Malouf’s juvenilia, but is primarily concerned with the first part of his professional career, from his début poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems (1970), to the collection of autobiographical essays, 12 Edmondstone Street (1985). The prose fiction of that period ranges from Malouf’s first novel,  Johnno (1975), to the collection of stories Antipodes (1985). After something of a slow start – Malouf struggled with the writing of Johnno for more than a decade –the late 1970s to the mid-1980s proved to be extremely fertile, with seven books appearing in as many years.

When a biographer tells her own story, the rules change. Because the subject is the self, the problem is not so much a search for the unknown, but what to tell about the known and how to tell it. One of Britain’s finest biographers, Claire Tomalin, has spoken of her pleasure in ‘investigating’ other people’s lives. What happens when she turns to her own life? What will be told and what withheld?

Tomalin’s memoir of a brilliantly successful life as journalist, literary editor, and author of eight biographies is more than a career study. It is a search for emotional truth in her painful, deeply troubled relations with her parents, and with her first husband, the philandering charmer, Nick Tomalin. The personal and the professional are woven together in a life remembered with remarkable resilience and magnanimity.

Reading Samuel Pepys, Tomalin says, made her aware of the seamlessness of experience. Unwanted by her father, she was conceived ‘not only without love but through the gritted teeth of [his] murderous loathing’ for her mother. Her parents divorced when she was eleven, after a ‘poisonous’ marriage, mostly spent apart from one another. Rivalry for parental affection meant that the two daughters of the marriage were never close to one another. Yet Tomalin doesn’t look back in bitterness. Memories of emotional neglect co-exist with knowledge of her mother’s intense love, a background that was culturally privileged, and eventual reconciliation with her father.

Mike Willesee has been one of the giants of the Australian media for over half a century. He was a major force in television for most of those years; but he began his life in print journalism and made a small fortune as the joint owner of 2Day FM when it was sold to the Lamb family. The memoir of such an important figure is always much anticipated, and its publication has been greeted with much fanfare, coinciding with a two-part episode on Australian Story, which is always notoriously shy of looking as though it is in any way promoting a commercial enterprise.

Tina Brown hit the ground partying in New York when she arrived in 1983 to revive the struggling Condé Nast magazine Vanity Fair. But an early diary entry shows the former Tatler editor was still a Londoner with residual Oxford snobbery.

Everyone at the party was so famous but unfortunately I had never heard of them. I said to Shirley MacLaine, ‘What do you do?’  She gave me a manic, hostile stare and went on talking to [investigative journalist] Ed Epstein about how he should research a book about flying saucers.

Brown’s naïveté did not last long. Her edited diaries of the eight years she spent as editor of Vanity Fair chronicle a brilliant professional and social ascent. The fourteen-page index is an A-list of names from Hollywood, publishing, the arts, fashion, business, and politics who crowded her life with their emaciated shoulders and bloated egos.

It is a colourful and turbulent life Alice Waters leads. Thankfully, it is turbulent in the fruitful sense, a process of regeneration and creation so nimbly edited into her autobiography, Coming to My Senses, that it strikes one as being deserving of its titular gerund. It relays the creation of both her ethos and her restaurant, Chez Panisse. Both are realised with great clarity throughout the book: style and substance ring together in both her writing and her aesthetic. Artfully crafted as this carefully curated view of a life is, it also remains humble and warm and satisfyingly alien to what we might now consider to be ‘food writing’. There is no ego here; Waters places importance on seasonality and intuition, regardless of culinary training or tradition. And all without bombast, as she herself asserts: ‘Taste is an incredibly strong sensation – it’s deeper than language.’

David Attenborough turned ninety last year. In a short animation celebrating his birthday, two Aardman penguins muse on their first meeting with the famous naturalist. ‘There’s something just about him,’ says the first penguin. ‘I don’t know why you wouldn’t love David Attenborough,’ declares the second. Indeed, it is hard to find anyone who does not admire Attenborough. Over the decades his work has fundamentally has shaped the way we think about ‘wilderness’ and the natural world. His influence on nature education and conservation – and modern broadcasting – is incalculable. It is rather astonishing to think that Attenborough has been making nature documentaries for longer than most of us have been alive.

In many ways, Attenborough’s long career maps out our changing attitudes to nature conservation. Adventures of a Young Naturalist is a compilation of three books originally written and published in the 1950s about Attenborough’s earliest expeditions – to Guyana, Paraguay, and Indonesia. The Zoo Quest programs were collecting expeditions, documenting the capture of wild animals for the London Zoo. They are more reminiscent of the hands-on physicality and showmanship of Harry Butler or Steve Irwin than of the quiet, non-interventionist observation of modern Attenborough documentaries. If the approach has dated, there is no denying the good intentions and the importance of such endeavours in promoting conservation and environmental protection in many places that might otherwise have been ignored.

The last page of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881) leaves its heroine, Isabel Osmond, with an ambiguous choice. To go back into the cage of her wretched marriage might be an exercise of will for duty’s sake, or an evasion, based on fear. Readers have been disputing Isabel’s motives ever since her creator so provokingly left the door ajar. Now, distinguished Irish novelist John Banville has taken it on himself to answer the question that James left hanging. What will Isabel do next, and why?

In her Introduction to The Best Australian Stories 2017, Maxine Beneba Clarke describes how the best short fiction leaves readers with ‘a haunting: a deep shifting of self, precipitated by impossibly few words’. Many of the stories here achieve this, inserting an image or idea into the reader’s mind and leaving it there to worry, delight, or intrigue. The collection as a whole seems haunted by the figure of the lost child, one that Peter Pierce suggested in his book The Country of Lost Children (1999) has preoccupied the Australian imagination at least since the nineteenth century, first as children lost to the bush and later as victims of adult behaviour. The children featured in these stories demonstrate resilience as well as damage, creativity as well as fear, but many of the adult protagonists are heavily shadowed by their anxiety over children.

After all my travels, all those years lost and won and lost again; after testing a thousand times the raw stock of my being, which never seemed to cook; when at last I had found a man and I had loved him, they called me up so I could see how the story ended: the living room covered in blood from wall to wall, the ransacked house, the abandoned axe. What was I supposed to say?

Given that the unnamed narrator–protagonist of Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyes (Cada despedida) has difficulty putting together and understanding her own fractured, nomadic life, it is perhaps not surprising that we readers have to call on all of our faculties to reconstruct her narrative – but it is well worth the effort. It is often a challenge even to know where we are in time because of the constant shifts from present to past, but this fragmentation contributes to a sense of timelessness – or to the unimportance of time – in this novella where the past is remembered from the present and where place matters more than time. This, too, calls for a focused reader alert to every verbal nuance and tense shift, and willing to assemble the narrative jigsaw. Spare a thought for the translator, Alice Whitmore, whose task it was to convert this Spanish puzzle into an equally enthralling English one – and who does so magnificently.

Conceptually, The Art of Navigation is as intriguing as it is ambitious. The narrative is part near-future time travel, part historical drama, part nostalgic Australian Gothic – and all slipstream fiction. The novel braids, unbraids, and rebraids three main threads of time and place: suburban Melbourne in 1987; the royal courts of Elizabeth I and Rudolph II in 1587; and the outskirts of a new, not-quite-Melbourne in 2087. Yet there is practically nothing simple about this book – not the style or structure, nor the way it resolves. This complexity is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of slipstream stories. Slipstream fiction is difficult to process; it’s demanding, often frustrating. It functions because it is strange, because it estranges. Readers are not made welcome, not offered clear or complete pictures, but are instead asked to decipher dream-like visions glimpsed sideways through a warped scrying glass.

Readers of this review are warned that they are in the presence of an addict. Having read Anthony Powell’s monumental twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time three times, I had been trying not to succumb to a fourth. Then along comes Hilary Spurling’s brilliant biography and will power has suffered total defeat.

Anyone who has read Spurling’s magisterial ‘lives’ of, among others, Henri Matisse and Ivy Compton-Burnett (each in two volumes), will be expecting that irresistible combination of immaculately detailed research and eloquent storytelling. There are pages of notes at the back giving sources for everything, but Spurling has not peppered the chapters with those little numbers that can get in the way of narrative fluency. Since, like Powell in his great work, she deals with a huge cast, it is important for us to know where she got her information about them, but equally important for them to establish and retain their presences.

Conveniently located next to Perrache
railway station, the Hôtel Terminus,
Lyon, is distinguished by its extensive
frescoes and mirrored columns. All rooms feature
narrow beds, equipped with straps for arms and legs;
two baths; and a gas heater with three pokers.
Tout confort.

The poetic epigraphs that introduce all three sections in Brink, Jill Jones’s tenth full-length poetry collection, are collaged fragments from the poems proper. Moodily, they skirt the edges of what’s to come: ‘I am to proliferate.’ The poems then, in all their multiplicity, evoke and explore being on the brink – of knowing, feeling, sensing, and making sense:

                         ... but there’s a feeling
that can’t be formalised or even spoken
as we pass in and out of and into again
the known, or the known knowns,
and the unknowns, the way things
brush past, or the way you fall
in haste, in love, what trickles onto
a porous path, as traverses of skin.
           (‘Data, Twigs, Memory Lapses’)

Jones is interested in ‘words that sound like words’, in how ‘Twigs make their Ts’. A poem is a construct that can talk of itself and the world, simultaneously: ‘It’s communication ... / though you don’t really know / if it’s a system of messaging, / or a type of presence.’ To Jones, it is both, in varying degrees.

The poem ‘Edge Against Sign’ alludes to this duality – of the sign and signified, these ‘pests of language’, the gap between them but their inseparability. The poem also wagers that past and present are not so easily delineated: all its phrases are sourced from Jones’s first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star (1992).

In ‘Speak Which’, Jones’s lyric mode is clear. The poem is an utterance: ‘words tear’ and ‘form / is tested / as leaves fall // not itself / but what it / does // shapes in / the mind breath / unsaid’. An unsettled feeling then emerges about writing place (and the allusion to country is deliberate): ‘trying to figure / landscape / and failing’. Antipodean poets have long occupied the land in their poetry, but as Jones points out, ‘who do we / think / we are?’

Jones, ‘being sneaky and queer within / and beyond spaces’, is occupied with the contradictions of the contemporary world – its beauty, how to live ‘without all the modest accounting’, versus our destruction of it: ‘We know plexiglass, expecto patronus / or police presence won’t save us’. Her poems are always ‘thinking the unthinkable today’. ‘[F]lowering and simply kidding’, she has a dry sense of humour – perhaps not unrelated to living in Adelaide – most evident in ‘Divination Isn’t What It Was’: ‘I went out among leaf litter that seemed glum / ... Is the solar system being hacked?’

In the first section, the poems draw images and ideas together breathlessly, list-like: they ‘spark and spit in the sky’. Some of these also split – literally down the middle – and shimmer/shimmy down the page. The second section continues with freewheeling poems, a number of which are knockouts, including ‘Our Epic Want’: ‘Raw music stunned us, it hurt more than love.’ In the final section, a range of notational, fragmentary experiments in sound and sense offer us a glimpse into the ‘shadow language’ of Jones’s process. These give way to more existential, elegiac poems that memorialise: ‘Our waxworks are dying ... We are terrifying But no longer awesome.’

Jill Jones (photograph by Annette Willis)

The poems in Kate Middleton’s third full-length collection, Passage, cover much terrain: untrodden land, moors, refuse, days, time, utopia, empire, ships, exploration, travel, saints, science, science fiction, colour, art, artworks, and animals – rats and whales, especially, but also lions, the oldest living tortoise, and a gynandromorph butterfly. Like her favoured rats, Middleton has ‘success at roving’ between these topics and themes: ‘(Follow them all the way down; refuse maps)’. Middleton trusts the intuitive, ‘go on your nerve’ approach, as Frank O’Hara put it, to writing: ‘The body bears the text / of distances covered.’ Poems, stanzas, phrases become islands: ‘A Lilliput of words and meadows.’

In Passage, she writes charms, elegies, centos, erasures, eulogies, ekphastic poems. The sections are split into ‘Past’, ‘Present’, ‘Future’, and an additional ‘Future’. Within these, poems aren’t wedded to chronology. Sci-fi crops up in the past and fourteenth-century fantastical travel-writer Sir John Mandeville descends into the future: ‘Paradise is / a loch / – and it / has / no bottom.’ Middleton revels in getting lost: ‘Lost is – and is not – a contagious / panic.’ Many of the poems work ‘in the borderland of dream // and memory // in the empty space of light between maps // of possible pleasure’.

The present is fleeting: ‘Only the ever-changing calligraphy / of waves sweeping the shore / records the moment. Then it’s gone.’ There is, tellingly, only one poem in the ‘Present’ section. There, and elsewhere, ‘memory is what is present ’.

Passage mines dozens of mostly textual sources to then create ‘puzzle patchworks’. The recurring sources (Dan Beachy-Quick, Siri Hustvedt, S.P.B. Mais’s This Unknown Island (1932), BBC science news, art, varying texts about rats or whales) intertwine throughout so that themes interlock and give the whole form: ‘the always-sharp meeting / point of water tumbles land / into shape’.

The ‘Watching Science Fiction’ sequence, which takes the television series Fringe as its inspiration, dovetails nicely with the poems about science: ‘When you turn to your / science to explain it nothing pierces the mystery of loss / ... In some unwritten future there’s a law of physics to explain it.’

Kate Middleton

Grief and loneliness feature in these assemblages of found traces left by others: ‘for what is loneliness but // awareness I am human? ... What is that awareness / but an act of praise?’ To end the poem ‘Prayer for Any Morning’, Middleton writes: ‘cherish the broken / monuments / days’. To Middleton, the poem is a monument, no matter how broken, in praise of imaginative exploration. Negotiating her own position toward her interests against a backdrop of climate change – ‘toxic hailstones rain down upon you’ – Middleton finds passage through time, text, tradition: ‘With all that elegiac grace you clear a space for yourself.’

Both Jones and Middleton approach a kind of ‘pure lyric poetry’, as Marina Tsvetaeva defined it: both are performative, oral, musical, and foreground the lyric ‘now’ or moment of utterance. And yet both assemble their poems, much like collages. One poet is perhaps more sceptical and rightly critical of the world, and one is more in awe.

Cities are essentially palimpsests, layered with overlapping lives, structures, and stories. Constantly in flux, each city is a sprawling and unwieldy text that is continually being rewritten. In Mirror Sydney, Vanessa Berry peels back many of the Harbour City’s layers, to reveal a tangle of hidden meanings and bygone inhabitants. Her book takes us on an eccentric journey through forgotten parts of the city’s history, suburbs, and architecture, while mounting a persuasive argument for paying closer attention to our surrounds.

In this dark historical novel, Garry Disher imagines a world in which small girls are sold by their desperate families and enslaved to men such as the brutal ‘scrap man’ – ‘a schemer, a plotter, a trickster’ in whom ‘nothing ... rang true except rage and self-pity’ and who profits from the labour of womenfolk known as Wife, Big Girl, You, and Sister. Neither the scrap man, nor the women shackled to him, are named because ‘names had no currency in the scrap man’s family’ until, in an act of defiance, You secretly christens herself Lily.

It is a pleasure to read a collection of short fiction in which every story is a work of elegant and meticulous craft. Catherine Cole has brought her significant observational and lyrical skills as a poet, novelist, and memoirist to bear on these stories, and the narratives unfold with cool, restrained style. However, this collection has more to offer readers than a selection of stylistically beautiful pieces. With ingenious use of theme and artful arrangement of individual stories, Cole delivers a cohesive collection that is far greater than the sum of its discrete parts.

The Guardian’s Australian bird of the year survey recently had the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) council in a flap. The student newspaper Farrago reported that the council had passed a motion condemning The Guardian for its failure to provide a preferential voting system. Farrago ‘broke’ the news on Twitter that UMSU president Yan Zhuang had fulfilled the council’s demands to ‘sigh very loudly in the general direction of The Guardian Australia’s offices two times, shaking her head upon the second time’. Zhuang tweeted that she wanted to end her presidency with ‘something as hilarious and ridiculous as this whole year has been’.

This undergraduate humour seems extraordinarily tame when compared with the sardonic wit and provocative articles that historian Sally Percival Wood presents in Dissent: The student press in 1960s Australia. The author argues that university newspapers played a significant role in Australia’s social, cultural, and political transformation during that tumultuous decade. But the sexual revolution is portrayed as more of a shuffle than a charge. In 1966, the University of Adelaide’s On Dit’s Bird of the Year was a female student rather than a galah or magpie. It took Women’s Liberation four years to make that ‘depersonalisation of the female individual’ extinct.

Ever since Henry VIII plundered the monasteries, relations between those in seats of power and learning have tended to be fraught, since political administrators do not take kindly to scholars thinking they know best how to run their own affairs, and vice versa. No End of a Lesson chronicles, in a relatively neutral and detached manner, events leading to the unification of Australia’s higher education institutions into a national system under the direction of John Dawkins, who was appointed Minister of Employment, Education and Training after Bob Hawke won the federal election in 1987.

Dawkins saw his mission as to make this system more efficient by consolidating colleges into larger university groupings, while aligning the research agendas of higher education more with government priorities. The rationale was to increase the rates of student participation while making universities more accountable for the public funds they were receiving. The obvious problem, though, was that such reforms meant that universities became more liable to centralised control, with Peter Karmel, then vice-chancellor of Flinders University, protesting that in ‘a free society’, universities should not become ‘an arm of government policy’. Eminent economist Max Corden, who worked in the United States during the 1990s before returning to Australia, was more graphic in his criticism, describing the Australian higher education system in 2005 as ‘Moscow on the Molonglo’.

Although a subject of endless fascination in the hermetic world of the legal profession, the judiciary seldom excites the interest of the broader public. Despite the efforts of senior judges to promote understanding of the legal system, the community seems largely content simply to trust that the machinery of justice is working as intended.

This general indifference towards the work of the courts means that it is all the more arresting when public debate is punctuated by one of its periodic bouts of anti-judicial vituperation. Not all of these episodes are alike: some involve the excoriation of the judiciary for alleged softness on crime, whereas others turn on the alleged illegitimacy of a controversial judgment. Yet they are each marked by a willingness on the part of tabloids, shock jocks, and even government ministers to denigrate a branch of government that, by convention, refuses to enter into its own defence.

The title of this book is surprisingly apt. Considering that whales are such charismatic creatures and icons of the conservation movement, it comes as a shock to realise how much of their ecology and behavior was unknown prior to the revolutionary research of marine biologist, Micheline Jenner. Part popular science, part vocational memoir, this book is a personal account of Jenner’s astounding career in cetacean biology. Spanning three decades, Jenner and her husband’s work with whale and dolphin populations has significantly advanced ecological knowledge and has, as a direct consequence, enhanced conservation efforts in Australian waters.

A modern cricket photographer using digital single-lens reflex cameras and high-speed motor drives can take 5,000 photos in a day’s play. With such a surfeit of images, the quality of seeing is diminished. For most of his career from the 1970s to the 2010s, English photographer Patrick Eagar would shoot four or five rolls of film, or around 150 to 180 pictures. An Eagar predecessor such as Dennis Oulds, using a plate camera, would take seventeen shots. As the photographers using plate cameras often took set positions, their technology restricted their view and they did not use the remote action devices pioneered by the 35mm men. Even so, the change to newer technology left some notable practitioners behind. According to Eagar, a leading photographer from the 1940s to the 1970s, Ken Kelly, used 35mm like a plate camera.

A collection organised around ‘the best’ of anything invites a particular kind of evaluation, a seeking of the criteria that such an elastic adjective might imply. The criteria employed for the selection of essays, fiction, and poetry appearing in The Best of The Lifted Brow, Volume Two seem to be grounded in a desire for intellectual cheekiness and a willingness to embrace creative transgression.

All work in the anthology originally appeared between issues fourteen and thirty-two of the magazine, and it includes several extraordinary pieces of writing. Poems by Margaret Atwood and Eileen Myles, unsurprisingly, are exquisite. ‘The Right Kind of Blood’ by Rosanna Stevens is an incisive essay on how we speak about menstruation. Adam Curley offers a dazzling analysis of River Phoenix’s performance in My Own Private Idaho. Rebecca Harkins-Cross imagines a drolly adversarial conversation between Jean-Luc Godard and Baz Luhrmann, the dialogue comprising actual quotes from the directors. It should not work, but it does.

Reading Bruce Beresford is enough to make any aspiring filmmaker think twice about following in his footsteps. ‘The Best Film I Never Made’, the title article of this collection of Beresford’s occasional writing over the last fifteen years, says it all. This is the sad, but in its way hilarious, story of his attempt to put together a movie based on the life of James Boswell. He knows from bitter experience that ‘skating on thin ice is the modus operandi of most film producers’; but he is ever optimistic, and his heart is in the project. With shooting only nine days away, however, his mobile rang: ‘Nik Powell was on the phone from Germany. The conversation was brief, just a few seconds – ‘There’s no money. The film’s off.’ The mobiles (supplied by the production office) all stopped working a few minutes later. A day or so later the production office in Shepparton had gone. No one connected with the film could be found.’

What is tinkering? As Katherine Wilson makes clear in Tinkering: Australians reinvent DIY culture, there is an easy answer to that question – but also several complex ones.

At the physical level, tinkering is what the protagonists in Wilson’s book do: they convert cars to run on vegetable oil; they build their homes by hand and perfect quince jam. One tinkerer whom Wilson profiles made a pedal-powered Random Excuse Generator; another fashioned a block of wood and slate to the exact proportions of an iPhone. Tinkering is the informal repair, improvement, and hacking of objects – and is an unconventional area for academic study. Wilson says that she feels ‘like the square-kid trying to codify the cool-kids’ fun’. But she needn’t worry; her writing is upbeat and delightful. Throughout the book we sense the rapport and deep care she develops for her subjects (one tinkerer died during Wilson’s research; the book is dedicated to him).

A major new exhibition opened at the end of September at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. The first of the three qualifying terms needs little explanation as a potential subject; as the title of Peter Conrad’s book A Song of Love and Death (1987) has it, opera is popularly seen as the supreme dramatic embodiment of passion in its various forms. The art form evolved in the city courts of Mantua and Florence in late Renaissance Italy, with the first public opera houses appearing in republican Venice in the 1630s. Opera has never completely lost its connection to centres of power and influence, however egalitarian its later intentions. This is made manifest in many European cities, where pride of place is given to an opera house as a display of royal or civic authority and prestige. And not only in Europe, but the saga surrounding the opera houses that were situated in three different locations on the island of Manhattan tell us much about the society of the city, so eloquently articulated in the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton. The case for Sydney needs no explanation. The Janus face of power is, of course, politics, and opera has always been imbrued with the political.

Grant Featherston (1922–95), the most prominent and successful furniture designer working in postwar Australia, is noted for his moulded, upholstered plywood modernist chairs from the 1950s, which combined comfort and style and which resembled work by Charles Eames. Featherston’s importance as a designer is well known: he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1988, and his work appeared in Mid-Century Modern: Australian Furniture Design, also at the NGV (ABR, August 2014).

Why do you write?

I figure that with practice I might improve. Even if I don’t, I will persist. If in an entire book there is one sentence that works, I see it as proof of growth. Sometimes that sentence stares back at me as if it came from somewhere else.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

The mind continues to conjure with greater imagination than can be recovered when consciousness returns.

Where are you happiest?

Like most people, with those I love. Life can deliver some harsh surprises, but also sublime moments, delightful but unanticipatable. I look forward to the next

A vexed issue

Dear Editor,
Your editorial on the issue of marriage equality in the December 2017 edition of ABR was a superb contribution. It reminded me of the worthiness of the expression of measured, deliberate, and forcibly expressed anger when it is appropriate.

I disagree, though, with your linkage of same-sex marriage and euthanasia, citing majority support for both. Marriage equality got the nod because it was just, not simply because it had majority support. Arguably, capital punishment for major crimes would enjoy majority support here too. Euthanasia is a vexed and misunderstood issue that prevails in the public mind on the basis of multiple misconceptions about the realities of its implementation and alleged need. There are still few countries in the world where it can be easily accessed. That alone raises alarm bells. What are the odds that Australia, notoriously backward on so many points, should suddenly be at the forefront of progressive thinking on this particular issue?

Pat Hockey (Facebook comment)

Svetlana Alexievich

Dear Editor,
Having been reduced to skim-reading to get through the 470 pages of transcribed recorded interviews that make up Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, I was eager to read Miriam Cosic’s review of The Unwomanly Face of War (ABR, November 2017) to get a professional critic’s explanation for the Nobel Prize in Literature, to which, as she reports, ‘the response in the Anglophone world was general bewilderment’. Instead, Cosic refers to the familiar shortcomings – ‘barely edited’... ‘without imposing narrative or explanation. Even biographical information is scant’... Cosic does suggest there might be an explanation for awarding the Nobel to a ‘kind of a journalist, kind of a social historian’ – the first in non-fiction, she might have pointed out, since Winston Churchill in 1953: ‘The response in Russia was the opposite: intense, personal, targeted. Alexievich wasn’t a real writer, detractors said; she had only won the Nobel because the West loves critics of Putin.’ If she wasn’t so hostile to Putin’s Russia, Cosic would have followed this up. Alexievich has no popular following in Russia. By contrast, previous Russian winners of the Nobel – Bunin, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov – are still household names. Alexievich is regarded as an ethnic Ukrainian with Belarusian citizenship writing in the Russian language, her output consisting mainly of poorly disguised political polemics.

L.J. Louis (online comment)

Forty not out

With this double issue, Australian Book Review enters its fortieth year. ABR was of course founded in Adelaide in 1961 as a monthly magazine. Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton edited the first series, whose final, quarterly appearances lapsed in 1974. The second series was created in 1978 under the auspices of the National Book Council. Edited by John McLaren (1978–86), ABR had moved to Melbourne – first Carlton, then Richmond, now soaring Southbank. The April issue will mark the four-hundredth appearance of the magazine in its second guise.

First issue, June 1978Forty years is a substantial run for any publication, and it seems fitting for a magazine undergoing immense change to reflect on the achievements, sacrifices, and intentions of those original editors and their supporters. ABR, in a sometimes difficult market for little magazines, has survived and adapted to new modes, new literary movements, new technologies because of the commitment of hundreds of individuals – and more than 3,100 contributors. None was more selfless or tenacious than my predecessor, Helen Daniel, who edited ABR from 1995 until her death in late 2000.

To celebrate their achievements and mark this new, ambitious chapter in the magazine’s life, we will unveil new programs and features throughout the year. In February we will name the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow (we thank all those who have applied). The following month we will announce a new development that will be of considerable interest to our many contributors. Several themed issues will follow. Major public events will take place here and overseas, including one at the Australian Embassy in Berlin during our German tour in June.

Four decades is a milestone, but to myself and my colleagues – given the magazine’s present robustness and potential – it feels as though we are just starting out. Ed.

Jolley Prize

Advances was entertained by online reactions to Kristen Roupenian’s short story ‘Cat Person’, which triggered a flurry of ‘hot takes’, tweets, and commentary after it appeared in The New Yorker on December 11 and went viral online. Responses ranged from befuddlement to outrage. Some people, convinced that it was an essay rather than a story, questioned its fictional bona fides. But it was gratifying to see short fiction generating so much attention.

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s premier awards for an original short story, has always welcomed new styles and voices. We look forward to being inspirited by new exponents of the genre with the opening of the 2018 Jolley Prize. The Jolley is worth a total of $12,500, of which the overall winner will receive $7,000. The runner-up receives $2,000, the third-placed author $1,000. Three commended stories will share the remaining $2,500. This year the judges are Patrick Allington, Michelle Cahill, and Beejay Silcox.

The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August 2018 issue; and the three commended stories will appear later. The overall winner will be announced at a ceremony in August. As with our other literary prizes, the Jolley Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English). It is easy to enter, simply visit our website for more details. The Terms and Conditions are detailed and comprehensive; and we have also updated our Frequently Asked Questions. (It’s amazing what people ask!) Writers have until 10 April to enter.

The Jolley Prize is funded by ABR Patron Ian Dickson. We thank him warmly.

Richard Flanagan

Fake news it seemed at first – or a mistimed April Fool’s Day spoof. Writing in The Australian on 11 December, Stephen Romei (the literary editor) reported that ‘Richard Flanagan has decided to boycott the Miles Franklin Literary Award ... a response fuelled by bitter personal disappointment’.

Flanagan, as we know, has been shortlisted on five occasions but has never won the Award. The most recent nomination was in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which had previously won the Man Booker Prize. According to another admirer quoted in Romei’s article, Geordie Williamson, this was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back, as I understand it’.

Richard Flanagan’s withdrawal seems unfortunate, and it is to be hoped he will reconsider in comings years. Flanagan has had much patronage from readers, government, and universities. He has won several literary prizes, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction in 2014, when – in a widely criticised intervention – Prime Minister Tony Abbott overturned the judges’ decision and insisted on The Narrow Road to the Deep North’s sharing the prize with Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People.

Remarkably, Flanagan is quoted as predicting in a September 2017 interview with Romei that he would never win the Miles Franklin Literary Award. ‘I won’t win ever. I’m confident that I won’t win.’ Such negative ‘confidence’ seems extraordinary and misplaced. Is there a suggestion here that the Miles Franklin Literary Award per se or successive judging panels have been ill-disposed towards Richard Flanagan? Why would this be? Because of Flanagan’s politics, his prominence, his Guildhall triumph, his Tasmanianness ...? The Miles jury changes regularly. No one serving on it now was there in 1995, when Flanagan was first shortlisted. (Disclosure: I was a judge from 1997 to 2001.)

Flanagan’s ‘boycott’ seems ungenerous to four of the novels that prevailed in the years when he was shortlisted: Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2002), Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2007), Tim Winton’s Breath (2009), and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (2014). (Advances will draw a heavy curtain over the first shortlisting, when the Miles went to Helen Demidenko for The Hand That Signed the Paper, the most freakish and regrettable decision in the long history of the Award.)

Many writers would draw solace or incentive from a quintet of shortlistings for Australia’s premier literary award.

Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, admired by many, was not without its critics. Michael Hofmann and Craig Raine were mordant about the novel in the LRB and TLS, respectively. Our critic, James Ley, was more positive in his review in the October 2013 issue, yet he remarked on ‘peculiar lapses of judgement’ and ‘a tendency to overplay his hand, to end his chapters with a flourish ...’ (Ley reviewed First Person in our November 2017 issue and considered it ‘Flanagan’s most artfully constructed and thematically complex novel to date’.) Literary judgement, like any prize jury, is ultimately subjective – not a ratification of celebrity or multiple shortlistings.

There is also a strong whiff of cultural cringe about this brouhaha. Just because an Australian novel wins the Man Booker Prize doesn’t mean that local judges should roll over in agreement. Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang – surely one of the greatest modern Australian novels – won the Booker Prize in 2001 but not the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for which it was shortlisted. It happens.

Australia probably has more literary prizes than there are days in the year. In a difficult environment for creative writers, they supplement incomes, boost morale, and in some cases increase sales. But prizes can have a toxic effect on our literary culture, skewing reputations and warping expectations.

To our knowledge, Richard Flanagan has not commented publicly on this ‘boycott’. ABR invited his publisher, Penguin Random House, to do so, but received no reply. Ed.

Porter Prize

When submissions closed four weeks ago, we had received just under 1,000 entries in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, our biggest field to date. We know what our three judges – John Hawke, Bill Manhire, and Jen Webb – will be reading over summer.

The five shortlisted poems will appear in our March issue. The winner will then be named at a free public ceremony at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne on Monday, 19 March. Following readings from the work of Peter Porter, the five poets will read their poems, after which a distinguished guest will announce the overall winner.

Alexis Wright and the Boisbouvier Chair

Alexis Wright (photograph by Vincent Long)

Alexis Wright, award-winning novelist and member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpentaria, has been appointed as the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne. The Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature was established in 2015 thanks to a $5 million gift from John Wylie and Myriam Boisbouvier-Wylie. Richard Flanagan was the inaugural chair in 2015.

‘I hope that I can do some justice to the position by sharing my experience, knowledge, and vision as a practising writer of over thirty years,’ said Wright. Her new book is Tracker: Stories of Tracker Tilmouth. Michael Winkler reviews it in this issue.

Marten Bequest

The Marten Bequest Scholarships – begun in 1979 – are one of the great travel scholarships offered in Australia. Administered by the Australia Council for the Arts, the Marten Bequest is offering travelling scholarships for Australian artists and writers to explore, study, and develop their artistic practices through interstate or overseas travel. The Marten Bequest Scholarship offers $50,000, paid in quarterly instalments over two years, to Australian-born artists between the ages of 21-35. Applications close 31 January 2018.

It has been an interesting month to read David France’s magisterial history of the AIDS crisis in the United States. As I sat down to the write this review, The Guardian reported that a Georgia state politician, Betty Price, had raised the possibility of isolating HIV positive individuals. ‘I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it,’ Price mused to a legislative committee. The story had further potency: Price is the spouse of Tom Price, who until recently was President Trump’s secretary of health and human services. Closer to home, in a speech to the National Press Club outlining the case against marriage equality, the director of the Australian Christian Lobby, Lyle Shelton, apologised for ‘the very hurtful and hateful’ things said about people with AIDS by religious organisations during the 1980s. It was a typically smooth and disingenuous move by the articulate Shelton. Apologise for incendiary anti-gay speech in the past while dog whistling prejudicial tropes in the present.

Richard Nixon remains one of America’s most intriguing presidents (1969–74). Intelligent, shrewd, and possessing a keen sense of the public mood, Nixon represented the ideal presidential model. His grasp of foreign policy has been unmatched by his successors, and his domestic policies represented the last hurrah of ‘New Deal’ governance. Yet there was also a personal darkness culminating with the Watergate scandal, forcing Nixon to become the only president to resign from office. John A. Farrell successfully reconciles these elements in Richard Nixon: The life, crafting a lively narrative that encapsulates Nixon’s contradictory aspects, while providing groundbreaking research that has eluded previous historians.

Matthew Engel has written for many years in The Guardian and the Financial Times, on topics ranging from politics to sport, and between 1993 and 2007 he produced editions of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. In this latest book he takes up the bat (or steps up to the plate) for British English. That’s the Way It Crumbles is a lament for the death of British English, a noble warrior battered and bamboozled and beaten by its enemy, American English.

At the beginning of the book, the white cliffs of Dover become the symbolic focal point for Engel’s dirge. The Luftwaffe planes flying over the cliffs were the major threat to Britain in 1942, but when in that year Vera Lynn sang ‘There’ll be bluebirds over / The white cliffs of Dover’, she sang to a nation that was clearly oblivious of the fact that there never had been bluebirds anywhere in Britain, let alone flitting about the white cliffs of Dover. Bluebirds are American, and are viewed by Engel as a potent symbol ‘of an invading force that proved far more effective than the Luftwaffe’ – the American language.

In his searching introduction to this immense volume, the editor, Harvard scholar David Der-Wei Wang, refers to the ‘architectonics of temporalities’ by which the project re-maps and re-chronicles Chinese literary history. A New Literary History of Modern China follows the model of the provocatively kaleidoscopic slice histories of French, German, and American literatures produced by Harvard University Press in recent years. The title of Wang’s introduction, ‘Worlding Literary China’, signals the scale of the ambition.

There are 160 bite-size essays by 143 contributors that focus on key moments on the timeline that reveal larger meanings. Some are by famous Chinese authors – Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Wang Anyi from China, Chu T’ien-hsin from Taiwan. Others are by leading scholars and thinkers in the field, including Wang himself, whose lineage goes back to Taiwan via Columbia University. Some essays are personal, others are written in what Perry Link calls ‘irrefutable academese’. A couple are by Australians, but it is mostly the view of China from North America. An appealing piece by Boston-based author Ha Jin imagines how Lu Xun wrote his first story, ‘A Madman’s Diary’, under the pressure of a deadline in Beijing in 1918, creating a new kind of vernacular fiction and launching the pseudonym that posterity would know him by, all in one night: the story’s theme, ‘eating people’.

Philosopher Derek Parfit claimed that nothing matters unless ethical and other normative beliefs are objectively true. Parfit, who died on 1 January 2017, wrote a three-volume work, On What Matters (2011–17), because he believed that the meaningfulness of his life, and the lives of others who devote themselves to ethical thought, depend on demonstrating the reality of normative properties and the necessity of basic ethical truths. This collection of essays, edited by Peter Singer, is a response by some moral philosophers to Parfit’s views about ethics, normativity, and meaning.

Parfit, though scarcely known outside the world of philosophy, was one of the most important thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His earlier work, Reasons and Persons (1984), made an impact mostly because of its claims about personal identity and duties to the unborn. He turned to the esoteric field of meta-ethics, the study of the meaning of ethical propositions, and the foundation of our ethical beliefs, because he became convinced that the very possibility of ethical truth depends on defeating David Hume’s view that values depend on our desires.

Victorians know the name La Trobe through the eponymous university, La Trobe Street in the city of Melbourne, and the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland. Tasmanians are familiar with the town of Latrobe in the north-west of their state. But how many are aware that all the above were named after Charles Joseph La Trobe, the first superintendent of the European settlement of Port Phillip, one-time acting governor of Tasmania, and the first lieutenant-governor of the new British colony of Victoria?

La Trobe’s reputation has been a mixed one. Few of his Melbourne contemporaries questioned his personal qualities, but they, and later historians, regularly contrasted these with his perceived inefficiencies and weaknesses as an administrator. In this sympathetic biography, John Barnes balances the ledger. Whilst not uncritical or shying away from what he sees as La Trobe’s weaknesses, Barnes argues strongly – and elegantly – for La Trobe being both a man of fine personal qualities and, for most of his time in Victoria, a competent and good administrator.

I grew up in a New Australian household, and admit at the outset to a biased view. My Lithuanian-born parents were actual Baltic immigrants among the other nationalities referred to by the blanket designation ‘Balt’. Much of the anecdotal material of Jayne Persian’s Beautiful Balts was deeply familiar to me from childhood: stories of the shock of a new culture and country so at odds with the idyllic descriptions handed out to prospective migrants; the oddities of Australian English; heart-warming stories of kindness; humorous ones of petty provincialism; and tales of less kind or frankly hostile reactions to difference. The sequence of events, dates, statistics, and official policies were less familiar and, therefore, of greater interest in so far as the data filled some blanks in my knowledge.