At a time when some fiction writers are busy defending their right to incorporate autobiographical elements, and some non-fiction writers are being charged with fabrication, it seems timely of Nam Le to begin his collection of stories with one that plays with notions of authenticity in literature.

The narrator of ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’, ‘Nam Le’, is a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as was the author. Like Nam Le, he has worked as a lawyer. This story has already been widely anthologised and it is easy to see why; it is clever and comical, evocative and moving – not to mention deeply intriguing. But this is not a collection whose chief concern is the creation of stories. The seven inventive narratives that comprise The Boat take us from Colombian slums to the South China Sea, from Hiroshima to New York, from Iowa to the Australian coast. Different cultures are explored in surprising ways.

First books can sometimes read like stylistic impersonations of other authors, but in The Boat, Nam Le has already carved out his own style. He is technically inventive throughout, creating and inhabiting very different worlds. It is immediately evident that Nam Le is in total command of these worlds. Through different points of view we encounter a teenage boy, a young girl, an older man, a young woman, and a young man. The voices are as believable as they are intriguing and various.

A Family History of Smoking, the most recent of Andrew Riemer’s memoirs, focuses on the world of his great-grandparents, his grandparents, and his parents. In so doing, it traces Hungary from the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse at the end of the Great War, on through the brief springtime of the 1930s and the chaos of displacement and destruction of World War II. It is a rich and rewarding memoir.

Get out that DVD of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Locate the scene with Marilyn Monroe in the pink satin strapless number, singing ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Study the dancers and find that statuesque blonde in the black bustier posing as a human candelabrum. That’s Anna David. (Her best friend, Eleanor Phillips, is one of the all-American girls with pink roses in their hair). It wasn’t Anna’s first film – if you’re very alert you can spot her in All About Eve – and it wasn’t her last. Hitchcock cast her as Kim Novak’s double in Vertigo, and Tippi Hedren’s in The Birds.

Full Hollywood stardom eluded Anna. Despite the exotic looks, her Russian accent made acting a problem. But she had a beautiful voice and sang ‘Summertime’ to Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker’s saxophone, partied with famous names and married a movie producer. Domestic abuse and heroin addiction took their toll. In the mid 1950s she moved to Paris with her new lover, a Beat poet. That didn’t work out either, but after working as a stripper and dabbling in spiritualism, she discovered Buddhism. The next stop was Darjeeling, where she began the search for peace and enlightenment via the teachings of two Tibetan lamas. Later she became a Buddhist nun, and the three of them founded a monastery in Nepal which became popular with Westerners. Anna, aged just forty-three, died alone and rather mysteriously during a meditative retreat in a cave a few years later.

Only some of this story is factual. Anna Davidoff is a fictional creation, the eponymous heroine of Sophie Cunningham’s second novel, Bird, inspired by the lives of Zina Rachevsky, Lama Zopa Ripoche, and Lama Yeshe, who did indeed found a monastery together in Nepal in the 1970s.

There are various colourful and inaccurate versions of Zina’s life on the internet. She was not a Russian princess or even Russian. She was born in New York in 1930, her German-Jewish ancestors having migrated to the United States in the 1850s. Blonde, beautiful and curvy, she appeared in a few Hollywood films and became a Paris showgirl, a party girl and a friend of the Beat poets. She went to Darjeeling in 1967 with her small daughter Rhea, and met Lama Yeshe, then about twenty-two years old, and Lama Zopa, who became her teachers and co-founders of the Kopan Monastery in Nepal. Instrumental in introducing many Westerners to Buddhism, she died as a nun, possibly from peritonitis, at a meditation retreat in the early 1970s.

That’s quite a life. Given Cunningham’s interest in Buddhism, film and pop culture, which also underpinned her first novel Geography (2005), one can understand what drew her to writing about Rachevsky, or somebody very like her. She has fictionalised her heroine Anna’s early life, and invented a more glamorous film career for her, but has stuck closely to published accounts of Zina’s activities on the hippie trail in Ceylon, India and Nepal and of her relationship with her Tibetan lamas, so much so that I was surprised she did not cite Jamyang Wangmo’s The Lawudo Lama (2005) in her extensive list of references.

Like Catherine in Geography, Anna’s life has been touched by people who have died, disappeared or been left behind. Catherine was chasing a father; Ana-Sofia, Anna’s daughter, is chasing a mother. Abandoned at the age of five when her mother went off to Nepal to become a nun, Ana-Sofia (or Az) has been raised by Eleanor, and now, some thirty years later, she is a Manhattan-based editor who lives alone with a cat, has a small circle of friends and a new man in her life. She is the same age as Anna when she died, which seems to be the catalyst for her sudden decision to abandon everything and go to India to find out more about her mother.

Information is also provided by Eleanor, who communicates her memories by letter, and on cassette recordings from Lama Dorje Rinpoche, one of the co-founders of the Nepalese monastery. Other recollections are contributed by the Beat poet Gabriel, who briefly shared her life in Paris, and Ian, Anna’s homosexual husband, whom she married in Calcutta. Told by three different first-person narrators, with corresponding jumps in time and place, the story sometimes becomes a little confusing. In most cases, the solution is not to go back but to keep on reading and trust that light will be shed by another narrator.

Cunningham studs the narrative with famous people who cross Anna’s path at various stages of her adult life – Ginsberg, Hitchcock, Bhagavan Das, Parker, Burroughs – and other references that evoke a particular time or place. Anna introduces her lamas to the music of the Beatles and the Stones; her Beat poet is a friend of Jack Kerouac; Eleanor opens a vegetarian restaurant called Serendipity in Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love; Ian and Az march for Gay Pride in 1985 as Aids depletes the ranks.

As a character, however, and given the fascinating material of her life, Anna is less interesting than you might have supposed, mainly because the various first-person narrators are limited in what they know about her, and their accounts sometimes have all the depth of magazine profiles. We learn a great deal about what she did but little about her feelings and motivations. This may be intentional – Anna is ultimately unknowable – but it does not make for an engrossing or satisfying story. Former hippies, Beatniks, flower children and others who wandered the Eastern path to spiritual enlightenment in the latter half of the twentieth-century may think differently

Diane Armstrong is a prolific, award-winning journalist whose book-length publications began with a memoir of family history, Mosaic (1998), and The Voyage of their Life (2001), set on the SS Derna, which brought Polish-born Armstrong, her parents and 500 refugees to Australia in 1948. In 2004 Armstrong turned to fiction with Winter Journey, about a Polish-Australian forensic dentist. Now we have Nocturne, which, although it features one or two Australian characters, takes place in Warsaw, England and Germany during World War II. It is a gallant and gut-wrenching story but a difficult book to review, because it suffers from inadequate editing.

Until the spurious Polish plumber was invoked to scare the daylights out of dog-in-the-manger Europeans, Poland was recovering well from her war wounds and beginning to receive the sympathy and admiration her long and tragic history deserves. The partitions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, plus a further territorial rearrangement favouring the Soviet Union in 1943, cast this large country as a geographical and political prize always up for West and East European grabs. A passing acquaintance with her people, her history and her culture seems to point to a Slavic soul combined with Catholic or Jewish spirituality, and a wonderfully successful aspiration to romantic elegance. Polish girls dress with Parisian chic, and elderly gentlemen still kiss women’s hands.

If the above sounds like a load of clichés, this book only goes part of the way towards undoing them. The prelude takes place in the Warsaw Ghetto at the start of the war, when the central figure, Elżunia Orłowska, is a fourteen-year-old living happily with her Catholic family in their comfortable apartment. One day a prophecy of the horrors to come freezes Elżunia as the horse-drawn cab in which she and her parents are returning from a concert passes by the Jewish quarter. ‘Suddenly everything stopped moving. The street became as still and silent as a tableau ... In the ghostly stillness that descended over the street, she had a vision of an enclosure that surrounded these houses, sucked out the air and entombed all the people.’ When the Nazis arrive, Elżunia, her mother (born Jewish) and her older brother are ordered to move into the Ghetto. The description of these beleaguered, starving years is predictably harrowing and behoves us all to read it. Nevertheless, Elżunia manages to train as a nurse, house an orphan and play an heroic leading role in the Ghetto’s resistance group.

Parallel to her story is that of Adam Czartoryski, before the war a would-be diplomat who becomes, first, a courier for the external Polish Resistance and then, in England, a pilot with an RAF squadron composed largely of Polish flyers. Before this last, the paths of Elżunia and Adam crossed briefly; she gave him the cherished silver cigarette case that had belonged to her father, and thereafter designated him her dream man. As a complex, terrible saga covering six long years works its tortuous way towards D-Day, Elżunia and Adam slowly progress towards a postwar reunion in which the cigarette case plays a portentous role. You cannot believe that Armstrong will succumb to a fairy-tale ending, but unfortunately she does – though not, at least, to the most obvious scenario.

The best and most gripping passages in this book occur whenever the shocking realism of history wrenches the story from the author’s genteel hands. The accounts of the two uprisings, the first organised by the Jews in the Ghetto, the second by the Resistance fighters in wider Warsaw, are dramatic and heart-breaking. After the Ghetto uprising is brutally crushed, an unforgettable episode follows when those who have not been killed by the Nazis, many of them youngsters, several of them wounded, make their stomach-churning escape through the putrid sludge and foul air of the sewers. A more upbeat but equally tense chapter describes the airdrop in which Adam and his Lancaster crew shower the Warsaw insurgents with desperately needed supplies. The Luftwaffe is shelling the British planes, Warsaw is burning and almost invisible in the smoke, but their target emerges far below as a large red cross made by people lying on the ground holding hurricane lamps.

These events make superb reading, not only because of their subject matter but because the narrative tells it how it is. At other times, however, Armstrong appears too carried away by the pathos or heroism of her deeply felt story to apply a critical eye to it. Practical questions go unanswered (how can the Ghetto hospital dress its nurses in neat peppermint-striped uniforms when everyone else is in rags?), while stilted or arch dialogue studded with clunky jokes clogs the characters. Adam, who is supposed to speak good English and is capable of sentences such as ‘Is this what you had in mind when you suggested a romantic stroll in the dark?’, describes himself as ‘the strange man outside’ (odd man out), before coming out with, ‘We go for dinner, yes?’ There are also too many bowls of soup never less than steaming, and smiles that are always mischievous. The predicability of the cigarette case makes one groan, as do the laboured attempts to introduce slang: did Australian flyers ever address their sisters as ‘Sis’, or say, ‘That glamourpuss in the slinky red dress is giving me the once-over ...’?

The main disappointment, however, in this earnest, laborious but worthy narrative, is the plethora of unnecessary explanations tacked on to everything. ‘Adam’s jaw ground back and forth but he said nothing. He needed all his strength to focus on flying the plane.’ The first sentence does it; the second is otiose.

Dedicated to the author’s ‘darling grand-daughters’, was this story written with one eye on them rather than on the adult audience?

It is tempting to become impatient, and to reach for a gun to resolve a problem, or a knife to cut a Gordian knot. As I write, the Burmese generals have been dithering and obfuscating rather than letting aid workers into their storm-ravaged country. The paranoid preservation of their honour and control bids fair to cause the death of tens of thousands of people. If the Burmese people cannot rise up to change this (and as poor, pacifist Buddhists, they are peculiarly ill equipped to overwhelm a shameless and violent régime), then we should surely invade, distribute the emergency aid, and replace the generals with responsible government. Some people only respond to violence, and surely justice demands this intervention.

When journalist Helene Chung grew up in Hobart in the 1960s, there were fewer than one hundred Chinese living there, and her complicated family seemed to include almost all of them. Her great-grandfather came to Australia for gold, but succumbed to opium. He was rescued by her grandfather, who worked in the Tasmanian tin mines, founding a small dynasty as brothers and cousins arrived with their multiple wives, and married more in Australia. It sounds like a familiar story, but as it unfolds the author’s intelligence and determination create an idiosyncratic portrait of what first- and second-generation migrants endure, and how they triumph.

Freedom on the Fatal Shore brings together John Hirst’s celebrated works on the early history of New South Wales: Convict Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1983, and Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, published in 1988. Both books have been out of print for some time; the chance of picking up a second-hand copy is almost nil. Black Inc. has done historians, students and general readers a great service with this combined volume. Convict Society and Strange Birth have an intellectual symmetry that justifies their union.

Hirst has described himself as a ‘controversialist cum historian’. The controversialist is evident in his hard-hitting journalism, which is usually aimed at the opinions of the left-liberal intelligentsia, whose thinking on political matters he finds mushy and irresponsible. The left-liberal intelligentsia replies in kind, insisting that Hirst’s politics can be so pragmatic – usually in defence of the nation’s apparently fragile coherence – as to be heartless or amoral. His defence of Tampa and condemnation of the Mabo judgment come to mind. Hirst is much more than a gadfly. He is a public intellectual with a clarity, conciseness, and sharpness that few can match. He keeps his colleagues on their toes.

This book is dedicated to all Asian Australians. Like the term ‘Chinese Australian’, ‘Asian Australian’ is revealing to my baby-boomer generation of Australian-born Chinese, for we have lived most of our lives known as Australian Chinese, a term that stresses our ethnic background over our Australian birthplace, even though our families have contributed to Australia for four, five or six generations. We may not speak a word of our ancestral tongue, and may never have trod the land of our forebears. The new term recognises that the growing numbers of Australians of Cambodian, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese and other Asian heritage are equally Australian as are white Anglo-Celtic Australians.

Also revealing is the creation of an anthology on growing up by more than sixty Asian Australians – not that it wouldn’t have been possible before but that it is unlikely to have been considered commercially viable. Some contributors are well known and already published, including film director Tony Ayres, fashion designer Jenny Kee, television chef Kylie Kwong, novelists Christopher Cyrill and Simone Lazaroo, and broadcaster Annette Shun Wah. Others, such as Tom Cho, Phillip Tang and Chi Vu, are known within literary circles. Many other contributors are unknown.

Possibly inspired by the British Film Institute’s ‘Classics’ texts, the ‘Australian Screen Classics’ series is not only downright valuable but also looks good. The latest two, in their smart black covers, each adorned with a striking still from the relevant film, confirms the importance of having such detailed attention paid to key films in our history.

It was enterprising of the series editor, Jane Mills, to commission Henry Reynolds to write the monograph on The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), a key film of the 1970s revival. Reynolds, the distinguished historian, is steeped in the study of Aboriginal life and how the indigenous population and its culture were confronted by European settlement. He brings a significantly different background to bear on Fred Schepisi’s film from one that a film academic or an industry figure might have offered, and that is refreshing in itself. He acknowledges his perspective at the outset, making clear that his judgements will have been reached from different starting points, but generously envies the power of filmmakers to ‘recreate the past’.

Between the mid-1940s and the late 1960s, Mohammed bin Laden fathered fifty-four children (twenty-five sons, twenty-nine daughters) from an assortment of wives (he married twenty-two times). It should hardly surprise that such a large group included several extreme personalities. The eldest son, Salem, channelled his manic energy into aeroplanes, cars, girls and the good life. The eighteenth son, Osama, born in 1957, chose a very different path. This would eventually leave New York’s skyline smouldering, Osama repudiated by his family and disowned by his country: a ‘black sheep’ in a league of his own.

Yet Salem, Osama, and a host of other bin Ladens (and their hangers-on), who inhabit Steve Coll’s fascinating book, may never have come to notice if it were not for their extraordinary father, whose energies and ambitions were not confined to the bedroom. Mohammed bin Laden’s arrival in Jeddah as a penniless migrant coincided with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s forced creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (formally announced in 1932). As oil revenues flowed, especially after World War II, so did demand for building. Much of this involved ill-advised self-indulgence by the royal family. Saud’s eldest son reportedly spent US$250,000 on an American kitchen for his new palace in Riyadh; the ‘state’ budget allocated five times more for the royals and their residences than it did for the ministry of health; in 1952 the royals went on a car-buying binge, handing out 800 new vehicles to family and friends.

In a recent column in the Australian, George Megalogenis looked back to Arthur Fadden’s budget of 1952 as a possible comparison with the current financial situation. Few political scientists, let alone journalists, display this sort of historical memory. In 2006, Megalogenis published The Longest Decade, an account of the combined years of Paul Keating and Howard, based upon extensive interviews with the two leaders. The book was reviewed in ABR by Neal Blewett (November 2006), who regarded the book as a useful ‘bullshit detector’ on his newspaper colleagues, whose political journalism appeared in The Howard Factor that same year.

Now that the Howard factor is no more, Megalogenis has revised his book to bring it up to the 2007 federal election, and to place the two leaders in perspective. The longest decade now spans the sixteen years of ‘our longest boom’. ‘Between them, Keating and Howard changed Australia,’ writes Megalogenis. ‘Yet for each reform they imposed, the nation snapped back, forcing them to adapt before dismissing them both.’

The train to Leura early Sunday morning
and our compartment full of total strangers,
Russian-speaking hikers, boots and shorts,
and four Americans, I’d say, late sixties,
calling out the stations as they pass:
‘Melbourne was more interesting than this’,
‘The trees looked better across Portugal’,
‘I want to see a kangaroo today’.

Chameleons are the ultimate multi-taskers. With distinctive eyes that can rotate and focus separately, these fascinating creatures can spot future trends while winking a fond farewell to past achievements. They can blend in with their surroundings if the mood takes them, or they can adopt a crimson flush to underscore their need to communicate. And when they write, they publish five books across several genres in one year, and look just like Sean Williams.

Reviewers must also play the chameleon when reading Williams’s new book, The Changeling. One eye cannot help but retain an adult perspective while reading this novel, which began its life as a creative work written for Williams’s master’s degree. This adult eye is aware of Williams’s prolific career as a science fiction and fantasy writer, so it automatically scrutinises The Changeling by comparison with his award-winning works for mature readers. However, to appreciate the story, the other eye must adopt the guise of a ten-year-old in search of magic and friendship.

‘These stories were all written on the 7.22 between Normanhurst and Central,’ reports the author. I find it eminently pleasing to learn that a writer is so driven to create that he will suffer through even the lurching ignominies of train travel to get words on the page. It speaks of a higher purpose, one that most commuters, hard-wired to their iPods or up to their eyeballs in Sudoku, will never recognise. So, hats off Mr Gaunt, for bucking the trend. His stories – there are three in this collection – all bear the mark of a writer with an instinct for narrative; they are the right shape. Unlike the trains they were written in, however, they tend to follow a haphazard trajectory, even if a sense of inevitability pervades. Between set-up and dénouement, the dramatic tension is confidently built as his protagonists bob and drift on the tides of their lives.

A journal with an ego, Going Down Swinging (GDS) is not afraid of blowing its own trumpet. There are two editorials: Steve Grimwade’s, written in the voice of his infant son, claims that GDS is the ‘finest literary journal on the planet’ – but this is cheeky enthusiasm, not arrogance. Lisa Greenaway’s editorial is best summed up thus: ‘we want the people who never pick up a literary magazine to pick up GDS’.

Detective Rubens McCauley has recovered almost fully from a gunshot wound suffered while exposing corrupt Melbourne cops: see Head Shot (2005). Colleague Cassie Withers supports McCauley, but his superior officer wishes him elsewhere. His private life teeters on the brink: he has neglected his mother who suffered a stroke; he has unresolved issues with his father; his brother wants him to counsel his niece about the dangers of party drugs; and he hopes to revive his relationship with his estranged wife.

Blast reinvented itself as a poetry-centric magazine in March 2005, and is now something akin to the Chicago-based Poetry – a lot of poetry, followed by critical writing about poetry – though Blast is shorter and Australian. Like Poetry, it is an upper-echelon affair, born from a philosophy of quality. The problem with the new Blast, for better or for worse, is that many of the same names keep coming up. Kevin Brophy, Jan Owen, Michael Sharkey and Leon Trainor have featured in four out of seven editions. Elizabeth Campbell, Bruce Dawe, Mike Ladd, Paul Magee, John Jenkins, Philip Salom, Petra White appear in three out of seven. The problem, you ask? They are all good poets!

And midway through the first course
of pickled fish in the restaurant
by the river that night
slid a black on black
barge
under the brilliantly lit
bridge

Andrew Rotter does not usually write about nuclear weapons. The Colgate University Charles A. Dana Professor of History is known for his works on twentieth-century American diplomatic history. He was approached, ‘out of the blue’, by David Reynolds in the summer of 2001, just before the attack on the Twin Towers. Reynolds, well known for his writings on the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the two English-speaking powers on either side of the Atlantic, was advising Oxford University Press on its series of the significant events of the twentieth century. Few events were more significant than the use of a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima in August 1945.

In 1964, newly appointed to the Department of English at the very new Monash University, I was uncertain about nearly everything. But as I unpacked my books in a pristine, sparsely furnished office, I found reassurance in the empty filing cabinet. I knew exactly how to fill its three drawers. As soon as I had some notes and a stack of manila folders, I would put poetry in the top drawer, fiction in the middle and drama down below. These three genres corresponded with the three terms of the academic year, as I had known it as a student. It was the natural order of things. That there might be a fourth drawer for biography, or even a space in the lecture programme for life writing, would not have occurred to me. This was the Leavis era – late Leavis indeed, but still preoccupied with close reading of literary texts. D.H. Lawrence’s mantra ‘never trust the teller, trust the tale’ seemed sufficient warrant for bypassing the teller altogether.

Henry Bolte and Bob Askin were the ‘big men’ of state politics in the 1960s, when I was a young political scientist. Bolte I never met, and Askin I met only once, but I knew the latter’s deputy premier, Charlie Cutler, quite well. I grew up in northern New South Wales and throughout my life, it seemed, we had only ever had Labor governments. The premiers cycled by with an air of inevitable succession: McKell, McGirr, Cahill, Heffron, Renshaw. Yet all five had been there in 1941 when the rejuvenated Labor Party, free both of Jack Lang and the far-left opposition to him, trounced the Mair–Bruxner government at the polls. For anyone who had been through that quarter of a century, Labor’s narrow defeat in 1965 was a shock. How could it have happened?

Why are there so many books about death and dying appearing at the moment? Is it about the baby boomers facing up to their mortality? It is certainly a subject that interests me, and Debra Adelaide’s novel should be compelling. Unfortunately, I found its determined flippancy laboured and grating. The first-person narrator, Delia, a writer of household guides, is not yet forty. Given a bad prognosis for her breast cancer, she decides that her last work will be a guide to dying, in which she will record her physical and emotional journey.

‘Science fiction and fantasy’ is the cover theme of Wet Ink. Not all the contributions adhere to it. Michael Welding’s essay on utopias and dystopias is a good introduction to the theory surrounding literary projections of both idyllic and apocalyptic futures. He notes that, before white settlement, the antipodes was often the subject of fantasy, referring to Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), in which a mariner shipwrecked somewhere in the Australian and Antarctic region discovers that the inhabitants can fly. He also jokes that flying was regularly depicted in speculative fiction but that the banning of humour (at airports) is just another case of political realities outstripping the literary imagination.

Written by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, of Macquarie University, this is essentially a text for both students and teachers studying ‘historiography’, which, according to my dictionary, is writing about history, rather than historians ‘making’ history, as is sometimes said here. Enthusiasm for the first edition of Fifty Key Thinkers on History (2000) has brought forth this new edition and shifted its emphasis more towards ‘historiography’. Indeed, a new introduction – ‘What Is Historiography?’ – suggests four different approaches to the subject.

When it came to Iceland, Monty Python, as always, had the properly irreverent idea. Their version of Njal’s Saga was a horrendous case of interrupted narrative. It took ten minutes for their ‘very exciting Icelandic saga’ to get started, bogged down as it was in endless biblical begetting, and when things did kick off, the whole sketch unwittingly collapsed into an extended advertisement for a sleepy British town named Malden.

In the years between the two world wars, the young Soviet Union was, for socialist intellectuals and many liberals in the West, a social laboratory, one that held the promise of a new world order. Inspired by the transforming power and promise of the October Revolution of 1917, some were drawn to admiration of the great Socialist Experiment ‘in a land where revolutionaries were trying to create a socialist society based on the principles of central economic planning’. This is how Sheila Fitzpatrick describes the lure of the Soviet Union in the preface to this collection of essays (presented originally as conference papers), which examines the experience of a small handful of Australian visitors to the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1940s. Twelve individual case studies are presented, including the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, the playwright Betty Roland and the feminist Jessie Street, all well known. Others are less familiar. The sample is small, but as the overall number of Australian visitors, at least in the 1930s, was also remarkably tiny – probably less than two hundred – this may not matter very much.

The world bank’s 1993 report, The East Asian Miracle, conveyed the quasi-religious awe prompted by the economic progress of many East Asian societies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. While somewhat self-serving (it was funded by Japanese money), it set the tone for much of the political and economic analysis of East Asia in the 1990s and its prospects. With few exceptions, we were told that the future belonged to Asia, that export-oriented industrialisation and selective liberalisation were the keys to growth, and that Asian societies had certain cultural features which furthered their comparative advantage and questioned the universality of Western notions such as democracy and human rights. This suddenly ended in July 1997 when the collapse of the Thai baht prompted a series of currency crises that produced political and social turmoil across the region. The Asian financial crisis, borne of bad investments, dodgy government–business relations and that favourite of the press, ‘crony capitalism’, raised questions about the foundations of Asia’s strength and the ‘Asian century’.

On a first reading, the accomplished poetry of Tracy Ryan seems spiky, colloquial, earthy and enjoyable. But the more subtle accomplishments of the poetry lie in wait on a second reading: the musicality, the careful crafting, an honouring of the traditions of poetry, the rhythms and experiences of the everyday and the bodily. To name her themes draws us into the poetry: motherhood, the vicissitudes of the body, childhood and parenting, work, love, poetry, death. But it is in beginning to hear the musicality of Ryan’s metaphoric language that a second step can be taken. Alliterative, demotic, formally playful, morally serious, the poetry of Scar Revision is craft and presence finely balanced.

Gerry Wilkes has done the state a great deal of service, and he should get full credit once again, as the eclipsed terrain of Australian literature emerges into the sunlight: which it seems to be doing right now, to judge from some recent movements in publishing. So let’s keep abreast of our language, all the while: that is to say, of our dominant or mainstream language, amid whatever others we have to offer.

Ilana Snyder, an associate professor in Monash University’s Education Faculty, writes in The Literacy Wars of Paulo Freire speaking in Fitzroy Town Hall in the 1970s. I remember him too. In 1974 he spoke in a University of Melbourne lecture theatre crammed with Diploma of Education students. Snyder was ahead of my class of 1974: by then she was teaching English. Like her, I was impressed with Freire’s humour and humanity, especially when he told us, disarmingly, that the language he had to write in was ‘crap’. He said that the educational authorities wouldn’t take him seriously if he didn’t shroud his simple insights with academic jargon. We applauded: he wasn’t doctrinaire, he was for liberation; he wanted to help people use the tools of language to name their world in their own terms.

Murray Bail’s fiction inhabits a curious space. Despite its attention to the detail of the rural landscape, the ‘endless paddocks and creaking tin roofs’, it is not, in any meaningful sense, realist, either in its intention or its execution. Instead, against carefully created backdrops, it weaves something closer to fairy tales, looping meditations on the power of story, and love, whose affinities lie – for all that many of Bail’s world of pastoralists who dress for dinner and unmarried daughters wilting in the Australian emptiness sometimes might not seem out of place in Patrick White – with distinctly un-Australian writers such as Calvino, Borges and, though less obviously, Rushdie and Marquez. It is not for nothing that the narrator of Eucalyptus (1999), Bail’s best novel, bemoans the ‘applied psychology’ that ‘has taken over storytelling, coating it and obscuring the core’. Yet, where the baroque outcroppings of detail in the magical realists of the 1980s serve to highlight the artifice of their creations, the detail of Bail’s fiction does quite the opposite, providing instead a framework for his fiction’s very particular reality.

Lucy Dougan’s recent collection of poetry, White Clay, demonstrates a considerably wider range than her first collection, Memory Shell (1998), while reaffirming how centrally preoccupied her poetry is with the potency of lost time, and also with finding the truth behind appearances, locating what is hidden or marginal and tracking down family ghosts.

Nation-building, educational imperatives, old-fashioned economics: children’s books get published for a variety of reasons, none of which alone is a guarantee of quality. Ultimately, a picture book’s success or failure comes from within, the interplay of the words and pictures on the page, and children have a wonderful way of reading around the institutional pathways constructed for them by authors and publishers. Why walk next to a wall when you could run along the top?

Patrick Allington replies to John Carmody

Dear Editor,

I sort of but don’t exactly agree with John Carmody, who sort of but didn’t exactly agree with my mixed review of Tony Jones’s edition of The Best Australian Political Writing (May 2008). Carmody suggests that the anthology should have been called ‘Best Political Journalism’ because it ‘completely lacks’ academic writing or reflective essays. I agree that the book was journalism-heavy, but there’s nothing to be gained by overstatement. It also included a number of longer essays, the best of which were intelligent, learned, thought-provoking and impassioned.

Her Majesty’s barren honours

If writers, and creative artists in general, needed confirmation of the nation’s tenuous regard for their contribution, they got it in various forms last month. Most egregious of these was the controversy surrounding Bill Henson’s recent exhibition in Sydney and his use of adolescent models. Mayhem of a kind we haven’t seen in decades ensued, none of it edifying. Much of this was predictable: the reflexive tactics of anti-pornography campaigners, the febrile provocations of some Sydney broadcasters, the facile editorialising from newspapers whose websites resemble lurid peep-shows. More depressing and unexpected was the readiness of politicians (including the prime minister), many of them unfamiliar with Henson’s art, to deride the work of one of Australia’s most distinguished photographers; and the wider public ignorance about artistic intent that was revealed, even gloried in, along the way.

It is no easy task for an outsider to anatomise a national cinema, and the Austrian academic Adi Wimmer suggests in this series of essays that Australian cinema has always been more national than most. In other words, our filmmakers have been unusually dedicated to the project of defining a collective identity through a set of instantly recognisable myths: the ultimate Australian film would be one that showed a group of sun-bronzed, laconic, Anglo-Saxon blokes battling droughts and big business in a wide brown land seen equally as a symbol of brooding masculinity and as a hostile mother.

Love them or hate them, these clichés have never quite faded away, and look set for a Sunset Boulevard-style revival in Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming high-camp super-production Australia. Wimmer himself is both assisted and constrained by his focus on national mythmaking: as a European academic addressing an international readership, he has little freedom to improvise around his subject in the jazzy, unscientific manner of Raymond Durgnat in his pioneering study of British cinema, A Mirror for England (1971), or of Philip Brophy in his recent monograph on Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), reviewed on page 45 of this issue.

Barcroft Boake is remembered as one of the lesser lights in the school of Bush poets publishing in the Sydney Bulletin in the late nineteenth century. Two facts are probably known to most people who have heard of him: that he wrote a gloomy but impressive and memorable poem, much anthologised, called ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’, and that he hanged himself with his stock-whip when young. (Some, mindful of Keats, might guess he was twenty-six when he died, and they would be right.)

Such considerations are of real interest in a case like Boake’s, whose wider reputation was largely posthumous. He died in May 1892, ‘in the first flush of success’, as Bill Refshauge puts it in this edition of Boake’s work. Thirty-four of his poems had appeared, all but three in the Bulletin, and all between the end of 1890 and the middle of 1892. In the years immediately following his death, A.G. Stephens took charge of the young poet’s reputation, though the two had never met. Determined to publish a commemorative edition of his complete poems, Stephens befriended his father (another Barcroft), acquiring from him much of his son’s correspondence, several notebooks and other materials. He even persuaded the elder Boake, a professional photographer with some literary ability, to write a memoir of his son’s life. (This and the letters can be found on the website of Hugh Capel, a Boake descendant, and are not included in the present edition.) Stephens’s edition, a handsome and expensive volume, appeared in 1897 under the title Where the Dead Men Lie. It sold surprisingly well, and in 1913 Stephens published a second edition, incorporating a handful of additional poems that had since come to light.

This is a book about warfare, battles and the preparations for them. It is not comprehensive but it is systematic, for it selects major periods or episodes in Western military history in the last one thousand years and, by applying economic theory, tries to pluck lessons from them. It extends from the mania for building fortified castles in medieval times to the bombing of Nazi Germany and the economics of the recent crusade against terrorism.

The authors argue, in passing, that history departments in the United States are lackadaisical in their approach to war. Academically, they are not very interested in its causes, apart, maybe, from signing petitions or writing letters to the editor about Iraq or whatever is the current war. When they have to explain the causes of a war, they offer rather random and ‘empirical’ observations. The same is probably true in Australia. Here I should add that I support this general line of argument. In the early 1970s I wrote a book about the causes of war and peace, pointing out – rightly or wrongly – that most types of explanations used by historians to explain wars have little factual foundation, though they seem, at first sight, to be based on common sense. Therefore, my sympathies were with this book, almost from the start. True, its theme is more the causes of battles than the causes of war, but the two problems, theoretically, hold much in common.

When applied to art and literature, the word ‘serious’ can be used to suggest a work is substantial and important, not necessarily that it is the opposite of humorous. There is a sense in which Rabelais and Cervantes are serious writers. But the slippage between these two meanings – the fact that our language permits a casual conflation of worthiness and sincerity – reflects a long-standing cultural prejudice which relegates comedy to a second tier, as if a talent for provoking laughter were somehow less praiseworthy than a talent for inspiring pity and terror. Tragedy is often assumed to be profound and ennobling, but comedy’s levelling tendencies, the anarchic implications of mockery and unbridled laughter, are apt to be viewed with suspicion.

Susan Lever’s David Foster: The Satirist of Australia, written with the cooperation of its subject, is welcome for a number of reasons. It is, firstly, a comprehensive study of a major Australian writer at a time when such extended critical works are relatively rare. Interestingly, it has an American publisher, which probably explains why Lever feels obliged to tell us that an RSL is ‘a social clubhouse, common in Australian towns’, and that rabbits and blackberry bushes are ‘signs that Australians recognise as ominous’.

I suppose our lives gain intensity through meetings with remarkable men and women. Occasionally, we encounter certain people whose rich inner lives mesmerise us and make us feel awkward and uneasy and out of place. Mr Manoly Lascaris had such an impact: he decentred people, made them lose confidence, made them feel physically uncomfortable, through his silence, his mundane chatter, his eccentric wisdom and the strange way he had of transforming domesticity into an exercise of virtue.

First, though, comes respect and the need to open yourself to your subject. The dialogues recorded in my book Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris (2008) are about thoughts underlying, or succeeding, particular events; they present the story of someone’s life at peak moments of mental realisation. The book is neither a biography nor a journalistic account of events and episodes. It records thoughts, ideas and conclusions in retrospect, as the culmination of the act of living and the art of thinking.

Books may furnish a room but they also furnish the mind. As somebody once said, ‘A man is known by the company his mind keeps’. One of my first moves on visiting a home is to check out the bookshelves, to discover something about the owner’s mind. Bob Carr, New South Wales’s longest-serving premier, has conveniently outlined his reading life in this opinionated, sometimes infuriating but always compelling account, which allows us to read his mind without physically visiting his library.

He is, first of all, a signed-up member of the dominant Anglo-Saxon intellectual tradition current since World War II – a sceptical liberalism which distrusts all forms of totalitarianism. His ‘indispensable’ philosopher therefore has to be Isaiah Berlin, who railed against those who sought to perfect mankind through a classless or a racially pure society. His favourite books in the great testamentary literature against totalitarianism are Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947) (‘the most important book of the twentieth century’) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973–78) (‘the suffering of millions is now beyond forgetting because of his testimony’). He provides a guide to the analytical and historical studies of the Nazi régime, with some odd omissions; Richard Evans’s authoritative work on the Third Reich is an example here.