Another pleasing note about the three journals under review is that each has a distinct personality and offers subtly different challenges. Heat, with its nicely insouciant summer title, Happy Days, has no unifying idea beyond its regular brief of providing a rich blend of fiction, poetry and essays, with always an unfamiliar name or two to add cosmopolitan interest. Meanjin customarily ranges far and wide over a particular theme, with some proving less cohesive than ‘travel’, which is the keynote for this marvellous issue, Meanjin Leaves Town. But whatever the focus, the sheer eclecticism of the approach always yields memorable, by which I mean life-enhancing, contributions. It’s early days for Griffith Review, of course. but so far their mandate does not include fiction, and Dreams of Land consists of twenty-two mostly politically charged pieces of reportage, some from a more personal perspective than others, and all focused on Australia. I learnt a great deal from it.

Reviewing is never impartial, so for me four essays stand out. Mark McKenna urges us to think about why the Constitution should be rewritten to reflect Australians’ growing sense of connection to the land; it is a persuasive piece of writing, admirably lacking in hubris. Noel Pearson explains why he no longer feels the policies of the left will improve the living conditions of his Cape York people. ‘The least charge that can be upheld against the left,’ he asserts, ‘is that it has consistently diverted the discussion away from the responsibility of the individual in favour of theories about underlying social reasons for people’s behaviour.’ His powerful, direct and eloquent essay will, I hope, provoke some of that public debate. In a pungent piece of writing, Andrew Belk pinpoints the nefarious environmental practices of the Pasminco lead-smeltering plant in Boolaroo. Australia may be a ‘nanny’ state, but, in extremis, its citizens’ health sometimes matters less than money-making corporations. Jack Waterford packs a less powerful punch than Belk, but his concise history of the rise and fall of community solidarity in Canberra, and of the way the fire reactivated that spirit, is none the less affecting. By the by, our new Labor leader, Mark Latham, is mentioned, even singled out for praise, in several of the essays, particularly by Pearson.

Griffith Review’s editor, Julianne Schultz, also contributes a fluent, if somewhat unnecessary, introduction, a kind of whistle-stop tour of her authors’ topics. I’ve never seen the point of doing this, as each piece is perfectly capable of standing alone. With Heat, one plunges straight into the first offering, while Ian Britain contents himself with a straightforward ‘editorial’, acknowledging Meanjin’s debt to a conference at the National Library on ‘Traveller’s Tales’, from which he has chosen, presumably, the pick of the crop. It is a canny collaboration which benefits everybody (but I would like to have known exactly which contributions began as conference papers).

What constitutes travel writing nowadays? This issue of Meanjin illustrates that there are few borders or rules. Perhaps. at its most basic, it is about conveying a sense of somewhere else, whether that is a place, a state of mind, or a culture. Peter Porter’s versions of two poems by the Russian Eugene Dubnov (done in tandem with the poet) kick-starts the issue. and others include Rimbaud, Pushkin and Celan, translated respectively by John Kinsella, Judith Hemschemeyer and John Friedmann. Benjamin Genocchio’s thumbnail sketch of his arrival in the US as a new citizen makes up in harrowing clarity what it lacks in length: an elderly man is rejected by the arrogant immigration officials while his wife is accepted, and no argument is allowed.

There are two excellent long reviews, both of which encompass ‘travel’: Robert Aldrich heads to North Africa via the recent books of the art historian Roger Benjamin, and M.R. Lovric provides an entertaining account of Iain McCalman’s The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro. McCalman contributes an equally diverting account of his travails on a replica of the Endeavour for a BBC2 programme, the first in a new genre to be called ‘extreme history’, but actually virtual reality television given an historical gloss. As a self-proclaimed geriatric historian cum deckhand, McCalman endured considerable deprivation, but ‘found a scholar’s paradise’. Of the rest, Kim Mahood and Barry Hill have written typically clear-sighted, frank and thoughtful essays on the disjunction between the physical journey and the one the mind must make in order to keep up. Though each is drawn to central Australia for different reasons, what they both understand, and submit to, is, in Mahood’s words, ‘that in any true journey one must be lost for at least some of the time’. Colin McPhedran, who was forced to flee Burma as a young boy in 1942, recalls clearly what it is like to be utterly lost and alone; he finishes his moving essay with the simple statement that ‘an ordinary Australian life was the greatest gift that I could possibly have been given’.

It is striking that only one writer is to be found twice: Adam Aitken, whose poems feature in both Meanjin and Heat. Aitken is one of eighteen poets to be found in Happy Days, the bulk of which is taken up with poetry, including an epic contribution by Luke Davies. Perhaps because I find the alpine Swiss landscapes by Hossein Valamanesh as uninspiring as the columns of numbers he has surrounded them with, this issue of Heat will not be a personal favourite. However, Delia Falconer’s short story ‘Hadrian in Hell’, the extract from Robert Gray’s memoir and James Bradley’s ruminations on ‘work in progress’ should not be missed: they, along with just about every other contributor to these three journals, indicate that Australian writers, and readers, have no reason to leave town.