Most editors look forwards, not back. We have to: there are pages to fill, readers to court, deadlines to meet. But publication of a 300th issue of a literary review invites retrospection, if not undue nostalgia.

Australian Book Review was founded in Adelaide in 1961. Edited by Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton, the first series ran until 1974. The second series, of which this is the 300th issue, began in June 1978. (The contributors included Don Watson, Thomas Shapcott, Bruce Beaver and ABR stalwart Margaret Dunkle; Horner sketched Manning Clark on the front cover; and new books under review included Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, Sumner Locke Elliott’s Water under the Bridge and Dennis Lillee’s The Art of Fast Bowling.) John McLaren edited ABR until the mid-1980s, and was followed by Kerryn Goldsworthy, Louise Adler, Rosemary Sorensen and the late Helen Daniel.

It is always a privilege to work with fine writers and upholders of literary values. I thank all our contributors – and all our readers – for enabling us to maintain what Delia Falconer memorably described as not just a magazine but an ideal. I salute my colleagues and forerunners. To celebrate the publication of our 300th issue, we invited a few of them to comment on the milestone.

Peter Rose

Inga Clendinnen

I wrote my first books as offerings to the Mesoamerican Academy across the Water, which I imagined as very like the Nine Mayan Lords of Death: nameless, aloof, implacable and almost certainly fatal. Then I met Helen Daniel (through, as it happens, a review in ABR) and discovered the Republic of Letters, Australian Branch. Helen ran her second-hand book and furniture shop on Brunswick Street as a literary drop-in centre. Then she took over the editorship of ABR, with its comet-tail of committed helpers, writers, readers and sympathisers. Then she introduced me to the professionals – the publishers, the booksellers, the journal and newspaper editors – who keep the Republic in health, and to the writers’ festivals where this normally secretive society flexes its muscle and shows its strength.

Journals such as ABR are the Republic’s blood and sinew, linking and animating its parts, and also its voice, declaring its presence, demanding it be heard.

Happy 300th birthday, ABR.

Glyn Davis

The recent demise of Australia’s longest-running magazine, the Bulletin, recalls the fragility of literary culture in Australian society. Despite its legendary status, the Bulletin joins the daunting list of local magazines and journals which falter and then vanish.

We are lucky that some defy the odds. ABR, now celebrating 300 issues, sits alongside long-running journals such as Southerly, Meanjin and Overland, and relative newcomers including the Griffith Review and the Australian Literary Review, in offering reflection on contemporary Australian literature, politics, policy and society.

ABR demonstrates how a good review sharpens the quality of Australian writing through intelligent criticism. This leads to celebrated controversies and occasional injustices. Yet without judgment there is no way to celebrate great authors, to promote the undeservedly obscure, to create audiences for new works and nurture debate about content and style. Criticism takes text seriously, as the ideal vehicle to carry Australian ideas into a wider world. In sup- port of such important work, 300 ABR issues is barely sufficient to start the task.

Morag Fraser

It was a Miles Franklin moment: a large crowd gathered in the marble foyer of the National Library and speaker after charismatic speaker calling for the establishment of an Australian equivalent of the London/New York/Paris Review. Suddenly a quiet voice cut through. We have an Australian Book Review already, she said. Why search so anxiously abroad for models?

The speaker was Helen Daniel, editor at the time of ABR, and a forceful advocate throughout her life for Australian literature and for a critical culture to support that literature. She would be delighted, I know, to be cutting the 300th birthday cake with her equally passionate successor, Peter Rose.

It is a brave person who edits, funds or publishes a literary review in Australia, with its small, scattered reading public and the grinding uncertainty of funding, but it is an essential labour if we want to understand ourselves in the way Miles Franklin intended – beyond the straitjacket of national identity politics. Literary magazines are the echo chambers of a society, the place where poets’ words can resonate beyond their own heads, where essays find their ease, where argument can run over more than two column inches, where novelists find their obsessive, isolated labours acknowledged – not always loved perhaps – and received by the culture they explore and articulate, where scholars can touch a reading public broader than the academy. Magazines that claim longevity, as ABR can, help build that national habit of critical scrutiny and the vital tradition of civil argument and engagement. How much better than war?

But it is endless, relentless attention to detail and dedication – to the twists and turns of the culture, and to the placement of every comma – that produces a magazine of quality, so I salute all at ABR, and all who have gone before them, for being there, day after day and night after night, to see her grow old(er) with such precision, wit and grace.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Asked in my capacity as one of its former editors to say a few words on the occasion of ABR’s 300th issue, I am reminded of my mother in the cake shop one year, buying, for the family celebration of my sister’s birthday, a cake featuring her favourite cartoon cat. ‘And how old is the child, Mrs Goldsworthy?’ the man in the cake shop inquired oleaginously. ‘Thirty-seven,’ Ma replied, deadpan.

While I was its editor in the mid-1980s, ABR was my baby. Twenty years on, I’m glad to see it still being looked after so well as it celebrates another anniversary. Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of editing the magazine, for, as with a real baby, it required, with unrelenting ruthlessness (and no doubt still does), to be fed and cleaned up. When you edit a monthly magazine, you’re working on three, sometimes four, issues at once: commissioning, editing, marking up, laying out, and trundling round the country to conferences and writers’ festivals with promotional bundles of the current issue costing you a fortune in excess baggage.

But one of the unexpected satisfactions of ageing is watching things that you had a hand in twenty years ago as they continue to thrive. I am sure the original editors Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton never thought the magazine would outlive them, but at this rate it will outlive us all.

Richard Walsh

I was actually on the board of the National Book Council when we made the big leap of faith and revived ABR in 1978 under the inspired editorship of the bearded and somewhat dishevelled literary warrior, John McLaren. I later served on its advisory board, as I think it was then called, under Brian Johns. I recall delivering a toast to its sainted editor, Kerryn Goldsworthy, at a typically rumbustious lunch in a small Melbourne eatery, probably on the tenth anniversary of the Glorious Restoration.

Such fond memories emerge from the mists of time, but the need for ABR remains constant. In March I reviewed in these pages Bruce Dover’s new account of Rupert Murdoch’s adventures in China. For some reason or other, this book will definitely not be reviewed in the Australian news- paper, nor, it seems, in its monthly Australian Literary Review supplement. Eric Ellis’s excellent review of it for the Far Eastern Economic Review (which recently fell into Rupert’s clutches) has been spiked.

Long live independent publishing! Long live ABR!

Geordie Williamson

I remember my first conversation with Peter Rose, even though it took place seven years ago, because I took the call on a mobile while standing beneath the four-tonne chandelier hanging in the auditorium of Sydney’s State Theatre. It glowed in Kitsch affirmation as he asked whether I was interested in reviewing for ABR. I was, and did, starting with some bloke – Malcolm Knox – who had written a novel called Summerland. I don’t think my effort was up to much, but it was largely positive and hopefully not too far off the money. (When, years later, we finally met, Malcolm was blissfully unaware of my review. ‘Actually,’ he added, ‘I thought you were a woman.’)

It sounds naïve to say so, but that review was my first glimmering that Australian critics could write about Australian artists, and that such dialogue had its own weight and worth. For someone who had been living solely on imported literature, it was a timely reminder of the riches to hand. I began devouring everyone from Thea Astley to Patrick White by way of restitution.

After moving to London for work and study, I turned to Australian authors for a different reason: homesickness. I know, for instance, that I read Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown in a pub off the Portobello Road, because my copy still contains the establishment’s beer mat as a bookmark. Likewise, a dried umbril of Cow Parsley pinpoints a reading of the ‘Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ to the Undercliff, above Lyme Regis in Dorset. Oz Lit became my Moveable Feast during these years. Or, more appropriately, it became my endlessly nourishing Magic Pudding.

When I eventually decided to return home, to join the Noble Society of Pudding Owners – whose ‘members are required to wander along the roads, indulgin’ in conversation, song and story, and eatin’ at regular intervals from the Pudding’ – it was ABR I was thinking of. I’m grateful to the magazine for welcoming me back to the feast.

Clive James

In Australia, one of the penalties for having survived long enough as some kind of literary figure is to be asked, in one’s senior years, to write a chapter in the latest distinguished volume devoted to the history of Australian literature. Such requests, though flattering, oblige the victim to write a story from which he must leave himself out. My powers of self-abnegation stop well short of that, so I always say no. Why should I leave myself out when I have so many contemporaries to do it for me?

But if I were forced at gunpoint to write such a chapter, I would begin by saying that the growing prominence of the independent literary magazines in recent years has helped to create an inhabitable Australian literary world, and that ABR has been in the vanguard of this development. Long wished for, an Australian literary world was slow to arrive, partly because it was so keenly awaited: the pot grew nervous from being watched. Especially in the field of poetry, the pre-modern era was dependent on the newspapers, with the Bulletin counting as a kind of amplified newspaper. The requirements of popularity had some strong results. (Les Murray has always been right to stress the importance of what he was first to call the ‘newspaper poem’, and, gratifyingly often, he still writes it.) Looking back to my own beginnings, I remember the magazines as being few, thin and hard to find unless you were attached to the same university as they were.

Actually, this memory is inaccurate: it was always worthwhile to keep a file of Meanjin, for example, and when James McAuley started Quadrant he raised the stakes for everyone. But when I sailed for England in the early 1960s, that was the way the Australian picture looked to me. From here on, my brief account gets personal. Peter Porter, I suspect, has a more informative story about what it meant to become an expatriate Australian poet. He had more reason to think about what was involved, because poetry was his whole endeavour, and the problem of maintaining a spiritual presence in the homeland he had physically left would be a matter of life and death to him. I could never claim that kind of thoughtfulness. Working more by instinct than by strategy, and always more by luck than judgment, I had a big enough task establishing and maintaining a poetic reputation in Britain, where my other reputation as a professional entertainer seemed determined to get in the way. Get caught on screen with your arms around Margarita Pracatan and see what it does to your status as a lyric poet.

But precisely because Britain was in possession of a fully developed literary world, it had room for someone who broke its rules of dignity. In Britain, everyone is aware, even if they hate the idea, that the poet who doesn’t fit the picture might be part of the picture. One could be given the cold shoulder – any number of cold shoulders – yet not be frozen out. Even my poems about Australia found space in the literary pages of London. Eventually, I found my- self writing more and more such poems, and Australian editors – who were still keeping their eye, as always, on the British and American magazines – began asking to re- print them. I was glad to comply, although I hasten to insist that I had no plans for making a reconquista. It had long been apparent to me that the expatriate, should he wish for a return, was up against the same difficulties as a space traveller making a re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere: unless he got the angle exactly right, he would burn up, with the implacable Australian press waiting on the ground to interview the fragments. But really my poetry was proof that I had never been away.

It had already proved that to me. Any decent poem begins in feelings so deep that we might as well call them instinctual, and what I had been discovering was the nature of my instinct, which had been formed in Australia and never forgotten it, whatever my conscious mind might have thought. With a whole heart, I can thank the Australian magazine editors for having spotted this almost before I did. At the head of these editors was Peter Rose, who generously made space available in the ABR for poems I had published in Britain and America but which might also appeal to Australian readers who had no easy access to the periodicals they first appeared in. Later on there were other editors, and there were poems which had their first publication in Australia, but ABR continued to provide me with my most welcoming landing strip for things I was sending in, or bringing back, from abroad: it was my Edwards Air Force Base. ABR even ran the full text of the address I gave when I received, in Mildura, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, which remains my sole big literary prize, and the only one I will ever need (ABR, September 2003).

When I published that address as a chapter in a book, I gave the book the same title as the chapter, The Meaning of Recognition. Self-dramatising is what I do for a living – everything I write, in whatever form, is an unreliable memoir – but the drama, I would like to think, is not always entirely about me. In writing about the magnificent but cruelly abbreviated achievement of Philip Hodgins, I was an expatriate trying to fulfil what I think of as part of the expatriate’s duty: to help give Australia to the world, and to bring a world view to the task of clarifying Australia’s position to itself. Laid out as an argument, the full story of how I view that duty would take a book all on its own, but I would be surprised if my work had not been telling the story by implication for these many years. ABR has played a crucial part in helping me to tell it, so I have a personal reason for being grateful for the magazine’s existence, and I am sure there has been many a contributor, over the course of its 300 issues, who could say the same.

Finally, it comes down to the importance of having a forum in which the concept of intellectual freedom trumps all other political standpoints: a forum in which, wrapped in our separate togas, we can speak our minds to each other without being knifed on the way home. No literary magazine is worthy of its title if it doesn’t provide that. ABR does.

Travel in America is a journey crowded with literary acquaintances. For centuries visitors have striven to make sense of the United States, drawn by its energy, admiring or disturbed by its civic culture. Charles Dickens visited twice, in 1841 and 1867, capturing his observations in American Notes (1842). His experience of American democracy confirmed him a political radical. Novelist Frances Trollope, on the other hand, travelled to America a liberal and returned a Tory. America has always confronted visitors with the possibilities of freedom but also the consequences of a market society, private wealth alongside public squalor.

One stranger in this strange land set the tone for many who followed. Alexis de Tocqueville arrived from France to study American jails, but wrote more broadly in the first volume of De la démocratie en Amérique, published in 1835 and still the single most influential rumination on the United States. How, wondered, Tocqueville, did the New World sustain a vibrant and practical democracy? Americans, he observed, had developed a distinct character through access to vast new territories, the absence of a strong central state, and values stressing self-reliance and hard work. The resulting tensions kept their society vigorous: a love of individual liberty but attachment to community; a suspicion of government yet celebration of nation; a land of unrestrained capitalism where access to riches ensured a rough equality of outlook.

In American Journeys, his account of travel in the continental United States, historian Don Watson mentions his distinguished predecessors only occasionally. Yet they sit, quietly, in the design. While Tocqueville was explicit about his aims, Watson is cautious about enunciating any wider purpose. Yet both are fascinated by the Americans, and make uncommon effort to see beyond the obvious. They share a preference for close observation, and a startling capacity to draw broader patterns from the small and familiar. Where Tocqueville studied the endless small local newspapers, Watson ponders the content of talk-back radio. Tocqueville reflected on civic culture as unifying forces in the American outlook, while Watson notes the pervasive influence of religion. American Journeys, in part, is a conversation across nearly two hundred years.

Tocqueville journeyed to America on a commission from King Louis-Philippe with fellow jurist Gustave de Beaumont. Don Watson travels alone, interest and opportunity selecting his destinations. He chooses to view America from a train, to follow the tracks, to see images flicker past the carriage window. As Watson observes in one superb passage,

I’m not obsessive about trains, but I do like the way they ease you in and out of towns and cities; the way they deliver you, like Spencer Tracy at the start of Bad Day at Black Rock, into the heart of things. I like being able to get off and stretch my legs on station platforms and breathe a local sample of the earth’s air. I like the sound and sway of them. I like the way they commune with the countryside. I like the fact that the rails on which trains run – or at least the paths they follow – were in the main surveyed a century and a half ago and, much more than modern roads, follow the contours of the land. I like the way trains change speed according to those contours, and how you feel the variation in the rhythmic clatter of the wheels.  

Travelling by train also involves the silence of sidings and empty stations, as Watson discovers the poor state of Amtrak, deprived of investment and left as transport of last resort for the poor. Many tracks have been ripped up – the whistle of the Chattanooga Choo Choo is no longer heard, the lines gone and the station now a Holiday Inn. Such missing links force Watson onto highways, listening in the hire car to radio shows offering the Lord’s Prayer and Fox politics.

The result is an America less often seen. It is the needy who travel on trains: people accustomed to being forgotten; people who can be left waiting for hours because the rail tracks are now owned by freight companies which give priority to packages over people. Watson develops an endearing relationship with ‘Julie’, the recorded voice detailing the latest delays across the Amtrak network.

Many on the trains are black, particularly in the south. Watson journeys through Louisiana shortly after Hurricane Katrina breaks the levees and drowns thousands. The carriages are filled with those moving north, those seeking shelter locally, a few heading home. The conversations convey anger at President Bush for neglecting New Orleans after the disaster, and despair about the national response. Through the carriage window, Watson and his fellow passengers see ‘row upon row of gutted houses. Thousand of rusting, abandoned, useless cars. Mountains of rubbish. Mangled hoardings. Uprooted trees. Empty streets.’

Yet the people Watson encounters are rarely fatalistic. They embody an optimism apparently at odds with personal circumstances. Things can and will get better. Americans, conclude Watson, ‘are geared to believe in themselves’. Indeed, no other culture seems ‘so disinclined to believe in the futility of existence. The cross, the high-five and the facelift all express the same conviction that life is winnable.’ Even the beggars are courteous, with a well-developed and crisply delivered personal narrative, as though chance alone put them on a decaying street in Washington DC rather than an LA movie studio.

For many on the trains and in the motels, diners and gas stations, in bars and on the streets, the answer to every question is God. Jesus as explanation and solution, an America in which ‘God is in the storm and the pancake batter’, as Watson observes. A land where football teams pray before the game, rodeo riders drop to their knees in the ring and intone a hymn of thanks, a land which separates church and state but expects politicians to invoke the Lord. A nation of medical innovation in which nearly half the population reject the science of evolution. Watson cites Tocqueville on religion, observing that when people do not believe in government, they incline to believe in God.  

Watson works hard to understand this ‘multi-party theocracy’. He visits preachers and churches, previews a Christian museum promoting creationism, watches a stand-up Christian comedian, wanders across the AM dial listening to clerical voices. He passes a hillside on which Noah’s Ark is being reconstructed. Perhaps, muses Watson, America should be understood not as a nation but as a spiritual pilgrimage, a place in which millions of people quest daily to grasp the meaning of their lives through personal encounters with God.  

American Journeys is selective. Watson avoids set-piece descriptions of the great cities. There are no vignettes from New York, only glancing mention of Chicago or San Francisco. The focus is on spaces in between: the backdrops glimpsed from trains, the tar and cement landscapes of travel, food served on polystyrene, modest hotels on the edges of town, with ‘cars spearing through the night, the distant sirens, the beige walls and bad art, the lights flickering in the vertical blinds’.

With a map to sketch the journey, and a handful of line drawings by Craig McGill to catch the fleeting, Don Watson has produced an engaging meditation on the United States. He offers no narrative save movement, no purpose but description, yet conveys a powerful sense of time and place. The book is beautifully written, with a form that evokes W.G. Sebald’s wandering across Europe. Watson must move among a people both familiar and deeply foreign, people who choose to live without cynicism or irony. The task is not always easy for an Australian sensibility.

In drawing his book to conclusion, Watson senses remarkable continuities between his America and Tocqueville’s nation of small landowners and ever-expanding frontier. There are important differences, too. Tocqueville demonstrated little interest in the plight of southern slaves, while Watson shows a lively appreciation of black America. And neither can integrate all the strands and contradictions of observation. Watson acknowledges his picture may not be complete. After outlining the brutality of life and its sinister mirror, television, he observes that amid 

every variety of weirdness, ignorance and brutality, it easily goes unnoticed that, in the day to day, America is the most civilized of places: how often you see in Americans and the way they deal with each other the graces you should like to see in yourself and your compatriots.

There are passages in this book so good they demand to be read aloud, aphorisms worth turning over and examining closely, the distillation of a life thinking about the glamorous America first seen in childhood, later complicated by a thousand contrary images, but still tugging at the imagination. Don Watson has written a profound and deeply personal work that makes for itself a place in the great tradition of American journeys.

In early 1980, Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin undertook yet another concert tour. One of their last concerts together was in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. There was a dismal yellow standard lamp for light and a revolving stage so that all the patrons could get value for money. The master of ceremonies introduced them as ‘Ham-erica’s own ... Yoohoo and Heffi Menhoon’. These exceptional siblings had been playing music together since 1932, usually in more salubrious venues. Yehudi often spoke of their liaison spirituelle and their ‘Siamese soul’. Their first public concert took place in 1934, in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. By 1980 it had become one of the longest and richest partnerships in the history of chamber music.

Seen from that famous ray of light
Discharging from the town hall tower
On the last stroke of noon,
The hands would stand forever at that hour
As though the holocaust of blinding white
That set it all in train,
When present, past and future were triune,
Were come again,
The endless now on which the blessed take flight.

I won’t this time. Silent at last and shunted
Into its siding in the Victorian Arts Centre
The container train started its journey in Yugoslavia
Two years before it arrived in Gippsland
Among trees that echo Albert Namatjira.

David Malouf’s Typewriter Music (2007) recently reminded readers that Malouf is a masterful poet. It was also evidence of an especially successful period in Malouf’s glittering career, appearing only a year after the highly praised collection of short stories, Every Move You Make (2006), and in the same year as The Complete Stories (2007). Now with the publication of Malouf’s latest Selected Poems, Revolving Days, we can see that this late efflorescence of poetry and short fiction suggests what might have been evident all along: that Malouf works best within a small frame. Malouf, who began as a poet in the 1960s, has – despite some flirtation with the epic mode – consistently shown himself to be interested in compact forms: the lyric poem, the short story, the essay, the libretto, and the novella.

Roma Mitchell came first in nearly everything. Not only at school and university, but in becoming Australia’s first female OC, Supreme Court judge, Boyer Lecturer, university chancellor and state gover­nor. But she had no inside track to success. Her father was killed in World War I, her mother survived on his pension and the generosity of friends, and Roma and her older sister were taught by the Sisters of Mercy for nothing.

Roma, who was born in 1913, went to university on a bursary in the days when female students were few and male law lecturers would not mention ‘rape’ in their presence. She became a barrister when courts had no toilets for women. To hear a Law Society lecture, she once hid in a hotel doorway behind a curtain. Accustomed to compromise while getting what she really wanted, Roma travelled the world, but could not drive a car; she read and wrote constantly, but could not type. She enjoyed good food, wine, and theatre, but she got up early and never missed Mass or Confession.

Selling Sex provides a comprehensive history of prostitution in Australia. In 342 pages, Raelene Frances (currently Dean of Arts at Monash University) describes the changing nature of sex work in Australian society from the colonial period to the present day. Frances’s text is bril­liantly researched and provides many important insights for readers interested in Australian history and culture, as well as the history of sex and gender.

In all intellectual disciplines there is a tendency to run in herds. It is the line of least resistance; it offers personal and professional rewards; and sometimes the herd, if capably led, is impressive in the way it rushes so quickly in the appropriate direction. The herd is often correct; but when it is on a stampede, is does not easily change course. This is a biographical dictionary of those Australian and New Zealand economists who often led – or opposed – the herd.

Those who are deaf to the roar of the herd sometimes turn out to be the leader of a new herd. We hear Colin Clark, one of the great economists in his field, saying that he had ‘an instinct to disagree with the powerful’. We read of A.G.B. Fisher, a very young professor at Dunedin before climbing the international ladder: ‘he was very much his own man.’ On the other side of economics was another Fisher, also a New Zealander by birth, who in England in the 1970s deplored the veneration for certain Keynesian policies by ninety-five per cent of the economics profession. Malcolm Fisher prepared the way for Mrs Thatcher’s economics; he was also founder of an economic institute in Kazakhstan in the dismantled Soviet Union.

That scourge of religion, Richard Dawkins, declared recently that the past year had been a bad one for God. He was probably referring to the success of his polemics against religion and to the tidal wave of kindred writings by other public intellectuals, such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. We do not know whether God would agree; and whether we should agree depends partly on how we read ‘success’. The books certainly sold and are widely acclaimed, and may even have garnered apostates. But for all their élan and entertainment, they are essentially concoctions and elaborations of arguments and observations made by earlier, more penetrating thinkers. If advancing understanding is at issue, as opposed to securing the public’s mobile attention, then we should judge that the tree of knowledge hasn’t burgeoned much lately, not on the theological branches, anyway.

The foundational work is less flashy and more demanding. A Secular Age is an excellent example of it. The book may become an enduring contribution to understanding religious belief, the evolution of the secular order, and the defining characteristics of modern secularism and contemporary spirituality. Like Charles Taylor’s earlier books, it is a product of prodigious erudition. Its 874 dense pages brim with original observation, cogent argument constructed from sources in a wide array of disciplines, and generous ecumenical gestures, even towards humanists. His story is complex, somewhat repetitious and yet unflaggingly interesting: it is loaded with so much novel detail and insight that the reader will be grateful for each scrap of familiar ground.

Brenda Niall (ABR, March 2008) feels ‘confronted’ by an ‘extraordinary claim’ in my book, Arthur Boyd: A Life. The two sentences that caused her consternation are: ‘Yet it seems that ultimately Martin’s spirit was crushed. His broken body would be discovered in the Blue Nuns’ gardens, lying where it had fallen, below his hospital window.’ Niall complains that I did not ask her opinion about Martin Boyd’s likely suicide. Since this was not included in her biography, Martin Boyd: A Life ( 1988), I believed she knew nothing about it. I understand how annoying it must be to write a full biography of a person and learn later of information that may have been available, but Niall’s defensive and plaintive attack demands a response.

The account of the suicide is not mine. It comes, as my footnote confirms, from Yvonne Boyd. In 2007, I sat on the veranda at Bundanon·with her. More than six years had passed since we first met, and she had just finished reading my book in draft. Our relationship had reached the point where Yvonne was happy for me to sift through, without censorship, personal letters and papers that she had only the day before discovered in a bureau drawer in her old bedroom. During that morning, the conversation turned to her husband’s uncle, Martin Boyd. She informed me that he had committed suicide. We discussed details for some time, with Yvonne stating that Mary Nolan had received the news that Martin’s body had been found in the gardens below the window of his hospital in Rome.

Every biography holds at least three stories, all of which, though very different, are closely linked. First of all, of course, there is the story told on the page – the story of someone’s life. Just below that is the story that consists of bits left over, all those awkward jagged pieces of raw or irrelevant data that have been eliminated. Some rejected from the beginning, others taken out at the last minute after much thought. But pervading the whole, though they may not be directly part of it, are the experiences and opin­ions of the people who provided so much of the information, whose life stories are invested in the final book.

As soon as I started work on An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin in 2003, I knew that family was at the core of Hephzibah’s story. Not simply the extraordinary family she was born into, with its three prodigiously talented children and careful, controlling parents, or the one she had in Australia and abandoned; or even the third one she made for herself in London. There was also her extended family, the many friends she made, all of whom responded to the all-embracing warmth and vitality that, they all said, made her such fun to be with. But she insisted that most important to her was the wider human family to which she belonged. When her sister, Yaltah, was in hospital in London, Hephzi­bah came to visit, bringing along five people Yaltah had never seen before. Hephzibah introduced them as guests temporarily staying with her and her husband Richard and said: ‘They’re all members of our family!’

Our retail establishment has never received the spotlight focused on its predecessors, the miners, pastoralists, makers and land boomers. The next wave, the shopkeepers – the Foys, McLellans, Treadways, Nathans, Morans and Coles – are mainly remembered by fading signs above grand buildings occupied by others. (For a wonderful example of history in pressed cement, stand in Prahran’s Cato Street car park and look east.) Melbourne’s glittering exception is the Jewish-Anglican Myer dynasty.

Sidney Myer, the nation’s greatest retailer, together with the electrification of our suburban train system, changed Melbourne’s shopping habits for sixty years. His memory has been carefully perpetuated in many philanthropic institutions and in no fewer than three biographies, each of increasing veracity. His grand-niece Pamela Myer Warrender has written a good story of her part in the family empire. She is the daughter of Norman Myer, who ran the family empire from 1934 to 1956, and who has somehow been written out of the spectacular family history.

Henry Lawson epitomised the weather-beaten laconic when he said: ‘Death is about the only cheerful thing in the bush.’ A century later, Bill Bryson, in Down Under (2000), picked up where Lawson left off: he defined the ‘real Australia’ as places where ‘no sane per­son would choose to live’. Somewhere in between, Patrick White created one of those dubious entities, a sweat-stained eccentric in an undaubed slab hut who told the explorer Voss that the country ahead of him was all stones and thorns, a place where anyone crazy enough to go out there might celebrate a ‘high old Mass ... with the skull of a black­feller and his own blood’.

The reality and the mythology of Australia seem to merge in agreement around what’s called the ‘harsh geography’ thesis, but if that signifies the mainland it certainly does not fit the island we now call Tasmania. There the world turns upside down, or once did.

From the beginning of British occupation, Van Diemen’s Land, as it was then called, was evidently endowed with an abundance of wildlife, indigenous plant foods and grasslands. This natural bounty created as many problems as did the unforgiving ground that is most of Australia. When the surveyor George Harris walked across the island from Hobart Town to Port Dalrymple in 1808, he was ecstatic about the trek ‘thro the finest country in the world...the quantities of kangaroos, emus [yes, emus] and wild ducks we saw and killed were incredible’. This was news to spark wild dreams.

The award of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics to William Henry Bragg, sometime Elder Professor of Mathematics and Experimental Physics at the University of Adelaide, and his Australian-born son William Lawrence Bragg is one of the icons of Australian science. Their ‘services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays’ is mentioned in the guide for new Australians, Becoming an Australian Citizen (2007), so we can put them up there with Don Bradman and Captain Cook.

John Jenkin has previously written articles and published a Bragg­in-Adelaide picture book, but his monument to them, William and Lawrence Bragg, Father and Son, is a masterpiece of its kind. It is a scholarly book, with 444 pages and 2046 footnote references, but it reads easily and I relished the sense of time and place that Jenkin brings to his study. There are a few spots where the lay reader might wish to skip the physics, but the text is insightful and absorbing, whether it shows us life in a colonial university, technical aspects of fighting in the Great War, the bitchiness of international science, or the struggle to understand new scientific phenomena.

An Adelaide boy with a PhD in physics, Jenkin lectured and researched solid state physics – the Braggs’ field – at La Trobe University before moving into the humanities. Since 2000 he has enjoyed an emeritus position in La Trobe’s Philosophy Programme.

For many Australians, the Burke and Wills odyssey is a sketchy episode in our history. For Kevin Rabalais, a recent immigrant to this country from New Orleans, the fragments of the story were obviously an intriguing premise for a novel. His first novel, The Landscape of Desire, retraces this expedition and the later one led by Howitt that set out to find the missing explorers. The strange thing is that the author does not approach his work as historical fiction, but as literary fiction.

This memoir moves through points of intensity in Kate Llewellyn’s life, from an idyllic childhood at Tumby Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in the 1940s through to her leaving Adelaide to make a new life in Sydney in the 1980s. By this time she is a recognised poet, but her life is in turmoil. The book does not set out to tell a success story; rather, it describes that uneven movement from childhood innocence through adult experience, with all naïveté, self-delusion, idealism, and hard-learned lessons. It is quintessentially a poet’s book, its stories heightened by arresting images, its movement circling rather than linear.

In 2005 Simon Cleary was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for the best manuscript of an emerging Queensland author, and here it is, every bit as fresh and lyrical as the report promised. It is one of those novels that works by close-up focus on substantiating detail, leaving the main contours of the plot to emerge as they will; like a bridge, perhaps, calling attention to its line and form and even its usefulness. It takes a more careful eye to appreciate the development and assembly and the structural stresses – its very strength.

If two swallows do not a summer make, two novels, no matter how similar, are no doubt insufficient to start a new literary sub-genre (no matter how ‘sub’). On the other hand, fashion is said to reflect the Zeitgeist; and biography, in this turbulent millennium, has become both favoured and fashionable. Is it possible then that quite soon a small shelf of the local library’s collection will be grouped under the heading ‘Biography as Threat’?

Rod Reeve manages a company that directs foreign-aid projects. Rather than flying in with helicopter-loads of rice, he focuses on ‘capacity-building’ and infrastructure. Agricultural science is his own speciality, but he has set up and run a variety of projects. He has worked to counter opium production in Pakistan, develop dryland farming in Africa, Iraq and Jordan (he had to evacuate during the 1991 Gulf War), and improve health and education in China, Laos and Indonesia. He assisted with the quarantine service in Papua New Huinea and post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh.

The title is presumably meant to be ambiguous. Not only did the protagonist, Howard Hughes, hurtle round the world in aeroplanes of his own devising, and not only did he ingest amphetamines at a rate that would finish most of us, but there is also a sense of his crashing non-stop through life itself. And 'speed', he tells us in Luke Davies' remarkable new novel, 'shouldered some of the weight for me ... helped me maintain control over a bucking project, since, control, ultimately, is all there is.'

As I read God of Speed, I couldn't help wondering who still knows about Hughes (1905–76). Younger readers may have seen Martin Scorsese's intermittently engrossing biopic, The Aviator (2004). Quite by chance, my daughter told me that she recently spoke to someone who had never heard of Merle Oberon. I can't say how shocked I was. It led me to wonder if such people will know who Hughes's famous bed-partners were (not Merle, I'm happy to say). It is one thing to say their name was Legion; it is another to say their names were also Billie Dove, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Faith Domergue (Faith who? I hear you cry; only dedicated buffs will know), among many others. Buffs will also have no trouble with Jane Greer, and how privileged they are, while the elderly will smile knowingly at the bedroom appearances of Susan Hayward, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Ginger Rogers – and surely everyone knows about Katharine Hepburn. But you can't help wondering how long people's memories are.

In the wake of the Commonwealth parliament’s apology to the ‘stolen generations’, what are we to make of Daisy Bates (1859–1951) – especially given that, in the past year, two new biographical studies have appeared, indicating, more than fifty years after er death, an enduring fascination with her commitment to ‘render the passing of the Aborigines easier’?

Bates will not ( as Ann Standish hoped) ‘sink like a stone', taking with her with the easy popularisation of some of the most morally and politically debilitating characterisations of the 'plight' of indigenous Australians: that 'full bloods' are doomed to extinction because they cannot cope with 'civilisation'; that 'half-bloods' are, at best, the consequence of that failure, needing to be saved, or, at worst, evidence of irredeemable lasciviousness. 'The only good half-caste,' Bates once confided, 'is a dead one.'

In this guise, Bates has, unfortunately, a ready appeal – as she did for Pauline Hanson. Yet somehow, both these books suggest, we have also to find a place for the Bates whose meticulous observations of Aboriginal people, and whose sensitivity to their stories, languages and relationships, have enduring value. She has, for example, been recently invoked as a useful posthumous witness in Western Australian native title claims. Perhaps we also have to cope with the fact that her story – the prim, proud figure in the desert – is wont to be received elsewhere (as one reviewer of Julia Blackburn's 1995 novel-biography fusion put it) as 'one of the world's most eccentric, lonely and worthwhile women'. Ballets, films ( even one proposed for Katharine Hepburn), an opera, paintings, monuments and many books find Mrs Bates entrancing. Why?

A good picture book is like a complicated dance between words and pictures in which each must be in step and working towards the same artistic outcome. If either clement is dancing to a different tune, the narrative strength will be diminished and the story will limp along. In The Peasant Prince: The True Story of Mao s Last Dancer (Penguin, $29.95 hb, 40 pp, 9780670070541), author and illustrator combine in an exquisite pas de deux. Li Cunxin, international ballet dancer turned successful Melbourne stockbroker and best-selling author, has now added a children's picture book to his impressive CV.

Reading The Peasant Prince is both a humbling and inspirational experience. The book begins when Li was living in poverty in a village in provincial China during the bleak reign of Mao Zedong. It tells the incredible story of this young boy's determination to succeed at the Beijing Dance Academy, despite his loneliness and the anguish of being separated from his beloved family. Award-winning illustrator Anne Spudvilas has created emotive illustrations which strikingly complement Li 's eloquent and somewhat formal writing style. She uses Chinese brush-paintings in drab greys to depict Li 's life in the village and his teenage years at the dance school, and then introduces oil on canvas in warm colours to create sumptuous illustrations which cleverly reflect Li's changed fortunes. With its beautiful design, emotionally charged illustrations, carefully structured text and strong message about the power of story, love and persistence, this modem-day fairy tale is a special reading experience.

Ross Clark Wins The 2008 ABR Poetry Prize

The menace of lantana has not prevented Ross Clark from carrying off the fourth ABR Poetry Prize. Mr Clark wins $3000 for his poem entitled 'Danger: Lantana', which was published in the March issue with the four other shortlisted poems.

Ross Clark is no stranger to the ABR Poetry Prize. His poem 'Full-Bucket Moon' was shortlisted in last year's competition, which was eventually won by Alex Skovron.

After a career as a high-school teacher, Ross Clark now teaches in two Queensland universities. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry and two chapbooks. Janet Upcher reviewed his latest collection, Salt Flung into the Sky (2007), in the March 2008 issue. Reacting to his win, Ross Clark commented: 'Both shortlisted poems created memories within rural settings; the former's fictionality is more obvious, but both poems are songs made from the sweepings of my mind, both begin in the rag-and-bone shop of history and locality. I'm thrilled to have won, and hope the readers of ABR will hear the creek flowing again in these words.'

In Glenice Whitting’s début novel, a dying man, Frederick, recalls his childhood in Footscray from before World War I to the end of his life at the close of the twentieth century. The theme is the split identity of an Australian-born man who has strong connections to his German heritage. His formative influence is his charismatic grandmother who raises him when he is rejected by his mother. This remains the centre of his personality even when, as he grows older, he craves acceptance as an Australian. Frederick is more like a first-generation immigrant than a second, especially as the grandmother names him Frederick Joseph Heinrich Frank Fritschenburg, a name destined to become a burden in his childhood as Australia succumbs to rabid anti-German propaganda during World War I. A similar predicament impels the family to change their name to Fraser.

There is much delightful detail about German cultural practices – cooking and food in particular, and his grandmother’s knowledge of herbs and natural healing – and a well-observed account of working-class Australian life in the first half of the twentieth century. The suffering of the unemployed during the Depression of the 1930s is well drawn, as Frederick frantically seeks work. There are some editing oversights that slightly mar the book for me, the most egregious being the remark made by a character during World War II (when the name-change from Fritschenburg to Fraser is under discussion) that, ‘Queen Victoria changed her family name from Gotha to Windsor after the last war’. Victoria died in 1901; her grandson George V was on the throne during World War II and the family name, in full, was Saxe­Coburg Gotha.

‘I had fully expected to find Karoline and her family living in difficult circumstances but in their home I am confronted and embarrassed by the extent of their poverty.’ In his stand-out piece of reportage, Peter Mares relates how Karoline and Jone came to Australia from Fiji to pick fruit, pluck chickens and make their families’ lives back home more bearable. They stay illegally, ‘enmeshed in a complex web of opportunity and obligation’. This refugee story details the global reasons for, and effects of, such journeys, as well as the daily hardship of poverty. The shock of reality, the yearning to make a positive difference, the allure of an ‘authentic’ experience, the realisation of its impossibility, and the weary cynicism of disappointment: these themes persist as Australians write about their Asian neighbourhood.

Canberra’s changing attitude to Asia and the challenge of bringing HECS­style arrangements to Asian education provide frameworks for interesting memoirs by Michael Wesley and Jane Nicholls. Phil Brown portrays a Euro­pean enclave in 1960s Hong Kong, and Bei Ling tells of establishing a magazine for Chinese expatriates. Raebel Buchanan’s essay on the lesser-known World War II hero Lofty Cannon is excellent, as is Hoa Pham’s poem about a Vietnamese veteran and grandmother. Therese van Maanen’s poem shuffles around words as if they are numbers in an equation before her startling final couplet.

Christopher Heathcote’s scholarly study of the abstract artist Roger Kemp (1908–87) took more than a decade to complete. Heathcote’s examination of this Melbourne-based painter provides a refreshingly different view of Melbourne’s art scene from the 1930s to the 1980s and opens up new vistas beyond the much-studied Angry Penguin circle.

The title is presumably meant to be ambiguous. Not only did the protagonist, Howard Hughes, hurtle round the world in aeroplanes of his own devising, and not only did he ingest amphetamines at a rate that would finish most of us, but there is also a sense of his crashing non-stop through life itself. And 'speed', he tells us in Luke Davies' remarkable new novel, ‘shouldered some of the weight for me ... helped me maintain control over a bucking project, since, control, ultimately, is all there is.’

Media discussion of the 2006 Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, tends to focus on his political persecution at the hands of the Turkish state. Pamuk concedes that history has forced him to don a ‘political persona’, one that journalists and literary festival audiences are keen to encounter. Yet Pamuk’s new collection of essays, Other Colours: Essays and a Story, reveals where politics (or political commentary) and the writer of imaginative thinking part company.

Reflecting the nineteenth-century obsession with death and the afterlife, thousands of British men and women turned to spiritualism and psychical research. This was, in part, a consequence of many educated people's unease with orthodox religion. From crowded public halls to private drawing rooms, practitioners were present during putative ‘messages’ from the dead, rapped out on tables, walls and floors, scribbled on slates and, occasionally, expressed in garbled song. Tennyson wrote, ‘the veil / is rending and the Voices of the day / Are heard across the Voices of the dark’.

My first emotions in a seagoing submarine were a mixture of fear and exaltation. I was a seventeen-year-old cadet-midshipman ‘sea riding’ in HMAS Oxley as it prepared to fire the first Mark 48 guided torpedo acquired by the Royal Australian Navy from the United States near thirty years ago. When the boat submerged off Sydney heads and we proceeded beyond a depth of six hundred feet, I assumed the strange noises I could hear and the weird sensations I felt were a familiar part of submarine life. While I had complete faith in the very experienced commanding officer, I realised that any catastrophic accident would probably result in the deaths of all seventy-two souls on board.

Sometimes books date quickly. This is the fate of To Firmer Ground, which was published in October 2007, one month before the change of government in Canberra. Had it appeared one year earlier, or had Kevin Rudd not triumphed at the ballot box, then this book might have provided a timely critique of the policy failings of the Howard government. Six months later, with Kyoto ratified and the new parliament having apologised to the ‘stolen generations’ and amended WorkChoices in its first sitting week, this volume seems bogged in the past.

Narrative, historical narrative in particular, figures strongly in these recent books from Judy Johnson – one a new collection of poems, the other a welcome reissue of her verse novel. Jack was first published in 2006 by Pandanus, shortly before that imprint’s demise. It won the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and is republished now by Picador. With its lonely, embittered, one-eyed captain, its miscellany of onboard characters and Coral Sea setting, it is not without potentially cliched romantic elements – which the Picador cover, with its Blue Lagoon-like scene and blockbuster typeface, is happy to trade on. But Jack compels.