Joan London’s new novel, Gilgamesh, is the story of several generations of travellers, moving between Australia, London, and Europe, as far east as Armenia. As such, it is part of a long and venerable tradition in Australian fiction: a tradition of quest narratives organised around topographical and cultural difference. It would be easy for a structuralist to sketch out the opposing poles between which such narratives are customarily hung, and the standard trajectory of the questing hero or heroine towards adventure and greater self-knowledge. London’s novel deploys these time-honoured structures while, at the same time, ringing some powerful variations on their more familiar novelistic forms.

The novel tracks a number of journeys, arrivals, and departures; but while the main character’s journey starts with saving pennies for her ship fare from Australia to London, this is not the only direction of travel and quest. Gilgamesh begins with the meeting of Australian Frank and English Ada in London at the end of World War I. They migrate to Australia, ‘a country where there will never be another war’, and take up land in a government settlement loan scheme on the south coast of Western Australia. Ada soon becomes known in the neighbourhood, though, as one of the many women who ‘couldn’t take the life’, as the two of them struggle to clear their debts and raise their two daughters. Progressively, they sell off more and more of their land. Sometime after Frank’s death, Ada’s nephew Leopold arrives suddenly from London with his Armenian travelling companion, Aram.

Contemporary Australian fiction continues to lean on the national past. Perhaps that’s a comment on the present, or the future, for that matter. It seems to be not so much a matter of the past being experientially ‘another country’, but a more engaging version of the literal one. Edgy, experimental attempts to represent the here and now, and to foretell what may lie ahead, such as Bernard Cohen’s Snowdome, are relatively thin on the ground; better, for example, to revive Our Ned for one more fictional fling. War, of all historical subjects, compels the Australian imagination more than any other. Yet World War II, less mythologised than its historical predecessor, but much more important to Australia, warrants more attention than it has received. It is sometimes said that Vietnam was the moment when Australia realised Asia wasn’t ‘the East’ (a cartographical absurdity we inherited from Europe), but its Near North. That’s nonsense: it was early 1942, with the Japanese ‘thrust’ down the Malay Peninsula, the Fall of Singapore, and the bombing of Darwin, that alerted Australia to its regional situation.

Garry Disher tackles this historical terrain in his new novel. Its hero, Neil Quiller, was born in England to an Australian mother just after World War I, the product of a wartime romance. When she dies, he is sent back, aged thirteen, to Haarlem Downs, the family cattle station on the Kimberley coast of far north-west Australia. Quiller’s ‘years of exile’ are abruptly ended by the outbreak of war, which he sees as an opportunity to reclaim his tenuous English identity. A capable pilot, Quiller serves as a photo-reconnaissance pilot for the RAF, flying perilous sorties from bases in Malaya, before becoming caught up in the Japanese invasion.

‘AT NIGHT,’ wrote Charmian Clift one summer in the late 1950s on the Greek island of Hydra where she lived with her husband and children, where the harbour village had been invaded by summer tourists, where teams of local Greek matrons invaded the kitchen in relays to monitor the foreign woman’s housework and mothering techniques, where the water supply was rapidly drying up, where she and her husband George Johnston worked too hard and worried too much about the inadequate royalty cheques that continued to fail to arrive – ‘At night,’ she wrote:

the water slides over your body warm and silky, a mysterious element, unresistant, flowing, yet incredibly buoyant. In the dark you slip through it, unquestionably accepting the night’s mood of grace and silence, a little drugged with wine, a little spellbound with the night, your body mysterious and pale and silent in the mysterious water, and at your slowly moving feet and hands streaming trails of phosphorescence, like streaming trails of stars. Still streaming stars you climb the dark ladder to the dark rock, shaking showers of stars from your very fingertips, most marvellously and mysteriously renewed and whole again.

‘Pagan’ was one of Clift’s husband’s favourite words for her, and one of her favourite words for herself. But it was precisely her own passionate capacity for nature-worship that made her such an empathetic observer of Christianity as practised in Greece. Transcendence and ecstasy were real things for her and, when she uses words like marvel and mystery, that is exactly what she means. ‘In the strange, still world of hot noontime,’ she had written on Kalymnos three years before:

… the burning grey beach is deserted, and the sea is still … Brilliant against the dazzling stairs a barefooted woman climbs slowly up from the sea, her head erect under a pile of black and crimson rugs … Without lifting my eyes I can look directly at the gilded cross surmounting the green dome of Agios Nikolas. The sound of chanting that wells up with the wide ascending stair seems inevitable, a vocal utterance of worship to the source of this pure incandescence that is pouring down on the world – Be still and know that I am God! The fringed brazen standards, the spindly black-ribboned cross are molten gold, drawn to the source of light, defying gravity, flowing up the cracked concrete steps.

Mermaid Singing (HarperCollins, $24.95 pb, 422 pp, 0 7322 6886 9) and Peel Me a Lotus (1959) are Clift’s two ‘Greece’ books, generic hybrids somewhere between ‘travel’ and ‘autobiography’. She wrote them in time stolen from her duties and pleasures as the mother of three small children and the junior partner in the marital, collaborative writing team. These two books have now been published together to form one of two companion volumes to Nadia Wheatley’s biography. The other, Selected Essays (HarperCollins, $24.95 pb, 408 pp, 0 7322 6887 7), contains an assortment of Clift’s columns and articles written between the family’s return from Greece in 1964 and her death five years later. Most of them first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, where her weekly column rapidly acquired cult status. In choosing eighty from Clift’s 225 published essays, Wheatley has tried, she says, ‘to give a representative sample of her concerns and interests’.

Peter Goldsworthy, doctor and poet, is a writer of significant style and concision. This new selection of his lyric poetry lives up to its jaunty, graffitied, lavender cover; it bespeaks lightness. And lightness is damned hard work. You don’t get there just by smiling and going to book launches.

The New Selected Poems bears out my harvested sense of his zest and pith. If Andrew Marvell had ever got into free verse, he would surely have delighted in Goldsworthy’s fancy footwork. He could have chuckled at such moments as ‘I prefer late friends / to burn in furnaces, / and not to visit in the night’, or ‘Arithmetic divides / and rules the world’. And he would have registered the gentle undercurrent of sheer mortality that runs bubbling along under the later poet’s unbuttoned ease.

Indeed, Andrew’s Metaphysical chums might have had much in common with Goldsworthy’s habits of mind, above all with that way of thinking that treats science or mathematics as a source of merrily dangerous language games. He now writes one suite of reflections on chemistry and its elements, another around the colours of the spectrum, those wonderful qualities that beguiled most of us in childhood, not to be explained away by physics classes. And when confronted by infinity he can say:

Number eight has fallen on its side,
an hourglass whose clock has stopped,
keeled lengthways, at attention,
like a Guardsman grown faint
with waiting for the count

Reading such lines, one travels easily back to ‘The Definition of Love’, with its famous parallel lines and teased lovers.

Although her work is often surprisingly varied, there is no doubt that when you read a Gwen Harwood poem you enter a highly distinctive poetic world. If it comes from her first twenty-five years of productivity, there is a good chance that you will be in a landscape of psychic melodrama. Everything will be liminal. The setting will be a sunset, the late sun will be flaring a dangerous gold on some intertidal stretch, the protagonist will have awoken from a menacing dream or, pace Kröte, be moving backwards and forwards across the threshold of one. The history of her poetry may be the way this scene increases in intensity as the voices that communicate in dreams increasingly come from figures in Harwood’s own past.

A friend describes the sensation as being in the movie set of your own life: everything is familiar, but not quite right. Auckland feels like an Australian city that has simply slipped a little, like the accent, to the east. There are hints of Hobart in the crisp sea and the misty sketched-in headlands. And of Sydney, in the over-abundance of harbour, the narrow streets of Ponsonby, which drop away towards the water, the houses filled with quiet light. Perhaps all Pacific cities look pretty much the same these days: here is the casino, the observation tower, the thirties picture palace turned into a Singapore-style mall, the narrow lane with outdoor tables under braziers; the same stands of Westpacs and McDonalds and Lush cosmetics stores. Perhaps what differentiates one city from another now is the sheer volume of traffic forced through its streets.

Peter Timms’s Making Nature is a delight. I found it especially enjoyable because I have been reading massively for my next book, so it was a remarkable break to take six contemplative walks with Timms and the many who accompany him, not in the flesh but in the word: Rousseau, Augustine, Petrarch, Edmund Burke, Kant, and a host of others, instructing, disrupting, agreeing.

One who did actually accompany him was Rebecca Maxwell, blind since birth, who showed him a new forest on the fifth walk, entitled ‘Sensations and Perceptions’. She showed me a new way of sensing things, too. She can feel density. In a room, she knows where windows are:

The privileges of artistic ambiguity have been stretched a little by the publishers in choosing such a broad subtitle for this work. So, as the author does, let’s clarify what Erotic Ambiguities is about: ‘While focusing on the female body in art, this book considers the way in which visual art produced by women was informed by feminism.’ This statement, as it turns out, is also not entirely true, as some works by male artists are discussed and the author does not limit herself to literal depictions of the human form. Furthermore, feminism is acknowledged as too loose a term and McDonald clarifies her territory by adding ‘contemporary feminism is a coalition of various conflicting feminisms that are neither co-existive nor independent’.

For any editor, one of the attractions and challenges of shaping a magazine is the unexpected submission that arrives at the eleventh hour. When the author happens to be someone of the stature of Raimond Gaita, one is indeed fortunate. This month, we are pleased to be able to bring you Professor Gaita’s incisive, yet anguished, contribution to the debate about reconciliation and genocidal impulses in Australian history. His piece, entitled ‘Why the Impatience? Genocide, “Ideology” and Practical Reconciliation’, is our La Trobe University Essay for July. It takes up some of the issues raised by Inga Clendinnen in the Australian Review of Books, an essay that prompted much correspondence in the June issue of that publication.

James Griffin and John Wren

Dear Editor,

Some of your readers will be familiar with the problem. You set aside a few days to get to the National Library to pursue a research project. You obtain the manuscripts, order the material in the Petherick Room, and settle down to uninterrupted industry, when an avuncular bore with too much time on his hands buttonholes you and bangs on about his own project. You do not wish to appear uninterested, yet hope that the windbag will leave you alone and get back to his own table, perhaps even write the book that he rehearses so insistently as the precious minutes tick by.

One of my all-time favourite short stories, ‘The Shipwreck Party’, opens this volume of Collected Stories. Any book of short pieces invites readers to enter wherever they like. I decided to start at the last piece and work backwards so that I could end up with my old favourite. The pace, structure, rhythm, images, restraint, wit, irony, and tone of this short narrative always work their magic on me, and I wait for the last thirty lines in joyful and horrified expectation. Having read the book backwards, I write this review in a mood of sheer pleasure.

Querulous impatience has overtaken discussion of Aboriginal matters in some quarters. ‘If we apologise, they must forgive and then assimilate. Invite them to discussions about how to ameliorate their misery – the disintegration of community, the alcoholism, the glue sniffing. But they mustn’t talk “ideology”. We’ve had enough brooding over the past, heard enough about treaties and self-determination, and more than enough about genocide. It’s time to move on.’ That’s what I hear and in that tone.

A few weeks ago, I attended the session on ‘What is an Australian Classic?’ during the Sydney Writers’ Festival. My own definition of what makes a classic is a simple one: a book from the past that retains significance, that still entertains and enlightens us, even though we may respond to it in quite different ways from its initial readers. In some cases, of course, classics were not so highly regarded on first publication. Even Gerard Windsor, at the festival, had to concede that Joyce’s Ulysses was a classic; it was of course banned in Australia, and elsewhere, for many years. And one of the eight titles in the first series of A&R Classics, Come in Spinner ($21.95pb, 0 207 19756 3), also received a very mixed reception, as one of its authors, Florence James, remembers in the introduction she wrote in 1988 for the first printing of the unedited version of the novel. In 1951, the Sydney Daily Telegraph called Come in Spinner ‘a muckraking novel fit for the literary dustbin’, even though it had earlier won the newspaper’s own novel competition!

I would now like to begin with a plea for small literary magazines. I now have a vested interest in their survival (well, one, in particular), but then, I always thought I did. Little magazines are essential to the vitality of Australian literary and political culture. They play an important role in nurturing new poets, critics, storytellers, and reviewers. In the current book-publishing climate, there are few other opportunities for publishing short stories, experimental fiction, or poetry. Small magazines instigate and foster cultural debate and present a diverse range of opinions. Many of the most important issues in Australian public life today were first raised and discussed in literary magazines, including the stolen generations and racial ‘genocide’, the perils of economic rationalism and globalisation, the politics of One Nation, and the implications of new media technologies.

In 1897, Winston Churchill published his only novel, Savrola, a racy account of revolution and romantic intrigue in the imaginary South American republic of Laurania. The book traces the rise, fall, and rise of Savrola, a gifted politician and charismatic orator who outmanoeuvres a despotic military regime to restore democratic rule to the undeserving masses, only to fall prey to a socialist revolution before returning in triumph and instituting an age of peace and plenty.

We were gone from each other;
we were throwing out small talk,
half-sent smiles, unmeant like mist.

I have always loved water and praised it.
I love my work and my children.
I have lived it and lived it …

I am the long lean razor shell
I have already come to the verge of.

I rise like a sunken boat from China.
I sing. Ah! What shall I write?

I recall her by a freckle of gold.
If I close my eyes, I can see a man with a load of bees
in an octagonal tower, five fields from the sea.

I speak from ignorance.
I think you have fallen in there sometime.
Is there something you can tell me
writing on these postcards scored out by the dark?

A solipsist sings the poem.
A slender mouth, a sceptical shy mouth.

It was not meant for human eyes –

Ah, I thought as he opened the door –
All these Americans writing about America –
Clarity once! Can you give me
a precise description?             Delicacy was never
enormously great nights returning, midnight’s
constellations …
Dull headaches on dark afternoons

look unoriginal, experimenting, experimenting …

Now he is being shot.
Photographs are dispensable.
Biographers yelp at the door.

Steadily stepping first, I let the world in –
British Poetry Since 1923
stealthily parting the small hours’ silence.
strange to see it – how as we bend over –
sunlight daubs my eye.

To speak about the soul
turn where the stairs bend.
We were gone from each other.
We were throwing out small talk,
half-meant, smiles untouchable as mist.

Why don’t you go and see him?’ said Alper. I had met Alper in a small hotel in Istanbul. Over breakfast, we discovered a common interest in Orhan Pamuk, a distinguished contemporary Turkish novelist. Before leaving Australia, I had read Pamuk’s only two novels available in English translation (Faber), including his latest one, highly popular in Turkey, A New Life, and the previous, The Black Book. These are so complex, weaving such a net of allusiveness to writings of East and West, that they seemed only partly accessible to an outsider. But they left a strong impression. Both books are about a quest: is it possible to have, let alone to know, a distinctive self? Any answer is denied by the characters’ own blindness – their perverse desire, born of fear, to be someone else. This question of self involves political problems of dependence and independence, of national self-determination, problems that have influenced post-colonial countries as well as divisions between East and West. These complex concerns are explored through ‘doubles’ or ‘twinned’ characters, who can ‘turn into’, or even destroy, the other. The conventionalising effects of language and writing complicate the issues.

I speak well crook. I speak better, when better. And I get bitter when my usually unstoppable health chucks it during an author tour. This happened to me the other week in Geelong, when the State Library of Victoria had Chris Beck and me as their travelling wits.

Chris Beck is my favourite photojournalist and straight-seeming journalist, so it was a groove for him to contradict me in public libraries, play the part of devil’s advocate and generally be fun to get on the road with. We spoke at four libraries, to mostly senior-citizen intellectuals. Unfortunately, the evening beforehand I copped gallstones, and the entire night saw both breath and life elude me utterly. The only temporary relief was to stand beneath scalding-hot showers in our residence until kind old unconsciousness turned up; and sweethearting exhaustion, writing’s sister, felled me.

A major work in the history of Australian architecture is a rare thing, and it is the more remarkable when the author is an amateur – in the true sense, that is – an enthusiast and connoisseur rather than a professional or academic hack. For Brian Andrews, though he has developed his expertise during a full-time career in telecommunications, is certainly not an amateur in terms of expertise.

This is a survey of Australian Gothic architecture from the 1840s to the 1950s, a date range presumably chosen to minimise any overlap with Broadbent and Kerr’s important Gothick Taste in the Colony of New South Wales. But it is so much broader a work that such circumspection was hardly necessary: it covers twice the length of time, and the whole continent rather than a single colony. As a survey of ecclesiastical Gothic design, this is as comprehensive as one would expect of Andrews but, as a survey of secular and domestic Gothic, it is fairly rudimentary. This is not a criticism of what has been achieved, for only a cooperative work of scholarship and a much larger volume could have covered the ground. It is, however, a criticism of the title and purported scope of the work.

The huge changes that have occurred in Australia in the space of a century were reflected in the recent centenary of Federation celebrations in Melbourne. They were evident, for example, in the repeated acknowledgment of Aboriginal Australians and in the selection of a young female Asian-Australian to speak on behalf of the future.

The most significant absentee from the Melbourne ceremony was not a royal personage or the jingoism of a century ago. What was missing was any invocation of the Deity to open or close the ceremony. Indeed, any mention of God at all. Not only was there no Anglican prelate to lead us in prayer, there was no prayer at all to thank God for the manifest blessings that Australia had enjoyed in the course of the century. Even at the opening of the new Federal Parliament in Canberra by the Queen, prayers were said by leaders of Australia’s Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions. But that was 1986. By 2001, that feature of public occasions had disappeared. No prayers or hymns. Welcome to secular Australia, where one of the fastest growing census groups is ‘no religion’.

I first encountered Francis Adams when various sharp or mordant observations from his The Australians kept cropping up in my reading about Henry Lawson and his times. For one thing, Adams’s widow, Edith (though there is apparently doubt about their marital status), invited Lawson and his wife, Bertha, to stay with her in the village of Harpenden while they looked for accommodation. Lawson duly rented ‘Spring Villa’ in Cowper Road, Harpenden, and thus began his disastrous English sojourn.

I developed a mental picture of Adams as lugubrious, gloomy, a denizen of the night! This, I now discover, was very much the Francis Adams of an 1887 portrait, reproduced in Meg Tasker’s admirable biography, in which he is darkly – even sinisterly – handsome, brooding, unsmiling, his gaze fixed and lambent. Of ‘Francis W.L. Adams … young poet and man of letters’ who, bespectacled, scholarly, trimly groomed (but still unsmiling), is pictured elsewhere in this book, I knew little. Tasker, of course, counterpoints these two aspects of her subject and provides a great deal in between.

Wifework is a good term for the things that women have been doing in Western marriages for centuries. It evokes all those other phrases coined in the 1970s and 1980s by feminists that resonate in the consciousness of modern women (including many of those who preface any discussion of family life with the mantra ‘I’m not a feminist’). Wifework embraces the sacrifice of ‘the burnt chop syndrome’, the exhaustion of the ‘the double shift’ and the psychological burden of ‘emotional labour’. The title of this new book raises hopes for a spirited discussion examining and updating earlier complaints, showing how things have changed and suggesting what needs to be done about marriages in the new century. As a been-there-done-that reader (married in the 1970s and feeling guilty about letting down feminism by doing so, divorced in the 1980s and feeling guilty about that, cohabiting and parenting in the 1990s), I was interested at once.

There are watchdogs and there are lapdogs. Watchdogs are alert. At the slightest movement, they growl. When they bite, it hurts. Lapdogs are alert – to their master’s moods.

Because the news media is such a vital conduit of information to the public, a tension always exists between the need to regulate its excesses and the need to leave it free from government interference. Media outlets habitually argue for self-regulation, rightly pointing to the long history of politicians using legislation to prevent scrutiny of their activities. Do media outlets adequately regulate themselves, though, or do they abuse self-regulatory regimes and put their commercial interests ahead of public interest? Do regulators hold media companies accountable?

As chair of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, Professor David Flint is an important media regulator. Recently, his record has been questioned by Stuart Littlemore and by Kenneth Davidson in an article headlined ‘Whose side are you on, Prof. Flint?’ in The Age (7 May 2001). Their attacks were spurred by Flint’s comments on releasing a report prepared for the ABA by Bond University’s Centre for New Media Research and Education:

The media ‘mogul’ – at least in Australia - may well be becoming an endangered species ... Where there remains an identifiable dominant proprietor, I suspect the influence is more in style and values rather than detailed intervention, with a touchiness about other business interests that have turned into a problem, although this touchiness may be reflected more in the staff being cautious than the proprietor intervening.

Flint said the report showed that the greatest influence on the media today is not media proprietors but journalists, and that journalists were more influenced by other journalists than by their proprietor. Accordingly, he argued that the cross-media ownership laws (limiting how much a proprietor can own in more than one medium) should be abolished.

Flint’s argument about the incredible shrinking media moguls was at best a half-truth, at worst disingenuous. He had already pushed this line during the Productivity Commission’s 1999 media inquiry. Bond University’s comprehensive report provided at least as much contrary data.

Yes, journalists are influenced by other journalists – for better and for ill. Journalists can be gossipy and incestuous, but they also need to follow other outlets to learn what news is happening so that they can develop it further.

To say that proprietors rarely intervene is misleading. Big proprietors simply cannot be interested in the vast majority of daily news stories. (Not even editors are able to read their newspaper cover to cover each day.) Where proprietors’ commercial interests are concerned, though, they are very interested, and there is a long, documented history of proprietors intervening in their media outlets’ coverage of these matters.

The self-regulatory regime overseen by the ABA came in nearly a decade ago; its greatest test has been the ‘cash for comment’ affair, which was sparked by the Media Watch revelation in 1999 that the Australian Bankers’ Association had offered to pay $1.35 million for John Laws to stop hammering the banks and to support them on his radio program. The revelation was important because it showed how the commercial imperative in media organisations was swamping editorial integrity and how a ‘freebie’ culture was deeply ingrained in journalism. Even more important, Media Watch host Richard Ackland kept pointing out that not only was Laws’s opinion for sale to the highest bidder but that he and his agent Bob Miller, with their acute sense of Laws’s broadcasting might, had actually approached the ABA with a proposal to present a positive picture of the banks in exchange for money. Ackland wrote in The Age (14 July 1999):

Without putting too fine a point on it, if you are a broadcaster consistently slagging an institution and then get your agent to approach them and say, ‘We’ll change sides in exchange for money’, there is a simple term for that. It’s called extortion.

Ackland says he has not been sued for his remarks. This is a golden-tonsilled silence that speaks volumes.

The ABA’s report, issued last year, imposed requirements for presenters’ commercial arrangements to be disclosed but no licences were revoked. Effectively, 2UE and John Laws were slapped in the face with a feather. Compare that to the previous system overseen by the Australian Broad-casting Tribunal. It held public hearings to assess whether an applicant was a ‘fit and proper person’ to hold a television licence and, famously, found that then Channel Nine owner Alan Bond was not. (Its ruling was subsequently overturned.)

Before Flint joined the ABA, he served on the Australian Press Council, which faced its greatest test during the 1980s media carve-up that saw Murdoch gain control of nearly two-thirds of the nation’s metropolitan newspapers.

The then Press Council chair, Hal Wootten QC, resigned, writing to his deputy chair to express his deep concern about the worsening concentration of media ownership in Australia and the council’s unwillingness to do anything about it. The deputy took the chair and nothing came of Wootten’s plea. The new chair was none other than Flint.

Looking back over nearly two decades of Flint’s performance as a media regulator, an old Latin question comes to mind: qui bono, ‘who benefits’? The general public or the media proprietors? Answering that question helps determine whether our news media is regulated by a watchdog or a lapdog.

Antarctica feeds the Australian imagination. The two continents are mirror images of each other: dry and largely barren, both managed to elude European description for longer than just about anywhere else. They are yin and yang; hot and cold.

As time goes by and Antarctica, like outer space, becomes one more tourist destination, there is legitimate concern about the damage being caused to the world’s most fragile yet painstakingly constructed biological environment. Even so, accounts of the exploration of Antarctica can be read these days without the emotional complexity that comes with looking back over the journals and diaries of the early European explorers of Australia. The reason is that no one lived in Antarctica. It’s one place where you can skate a long way on the myth of terra nullius. Those who went there in the early years of the twentieth century discovered relatively little. Their stories are all about encounters with their own personalities, with the baggage they brought with them, with their craving, with their inner void, with their ego. They all met the Other. It’s just that the Other was looking back at them from the mirror.

Husbands, wives, and lovers, desperadoes,  mistresses, adulterers, transsexuals, prostitutes and  paedophiles: these are some of the people who populate Mandy Sayer’s 15 Kinds of Desire. Despite such a roll-call of confronting players, Sayer’s short story collection is not so much an itemisation of sexual peccadilloes but an exploration into various gradations of love, sex and obsession.

Many of the stories are set in and around Sydney’s Kings Cross, a locale favoured by Sayer for playing out fractured or inverted fairy tales. Eleven-year-old Scarlet, for instance, seems like the modern-day Little Red Riding Hood, picking her way down a gauntlet of drunks, pimps, bums, perverts and assorted other wolves. Instead of delivering a basket of goodies to her transvestite grandfather, she carries close to her chest a packet of smack.

Five of Laurie Moore’s ancestors were in the party that finally captured Jimmy Governor in October 1900, ninety-nine days after his murderous onslaught on the Mawbey family. He and his wife have assiduously traversed the terrain of the manhunt for Jimmy and his brother Joe. Moore’s book, The True Life of Jimmy Governor, written in conjunction with Stephan Williams, is an admirable amateur labour: loving, painstaking, yet never without a tinge of irony about fashions of remembering folk anti-heroes in Australia. As the authors remark near the end of their story: ‘the brothers held up, or were fed by, everyone’s great aunt or grandfather’.

The book is a very detailed narrative of the physical elements of the pursuit of the Governors: ‘the largest manhunt in Australian history’ for ‘the last proclaimed outlaws in New South Wales’. It is not an account of the varied representations of their story. Not often does it concern itself with what general conclusions might be drawn from these events. Moore and Williams contend that the Governors’ was a ‘personal vendetta’ rather than vengeance for historical crimes against the Aborigines. The evidence they have drawn on is copious, but not always treated with a consistently critical disposition.

Following Ned Kelly, Jimmy Governor was keen to write about his exploits in a self-justifying way. Several of his letters were published in regional newspapers. The authors have sifted these thoroughly, and quote at length. Another staple of their narrative is the group of ballads associated with the Governors. Some are bluntly demotic: ‘The Governors was badly treated / As my father said the same’; others are in jest: ‘The Indian sportsmen stick the pig / And follow the tiger track: / But where on earth is such sport to be seen / As hunting the Breelong Blacks!’; and then there is Les Murray’s ‘The Ballad of Jimmy Governor’: ‘They don’t like us killing their women. / Their women kill us every day.’ An appendix prints a number of these ballads. It gives some indication of where they came from, but ventures nothing by way of literary criticism.

From its mix of fiction and criticism to the format of its contents page, this collection is clearly a follow-up to Helen Merrick and Tess Williams’s feminist science fiction anthology, Women of Other Worlds (1999). There are, however, major differences. Women emerged from a unique and unrepeatable event, a meeting of live minds at the twentieth WisCon Feminist SF Convention. It is wildly eclectic, often irreverent, ranging from recipes and e-mail debates on gender to full-blown critical articles on female fan culture, united only by the feminist perspective and the contributor’s presence at WisCon. Its reprints go back no further than 1986. The reader is encouraged to dip. In contrast, Earth is united by its ostensible theme, ‘far futures’, with reprints from as far back as the 1930s, but only ‘proper’ fiction – stories, excerpts from novels – and ‘proper’ critical pieces. The overall tone is sober if not solemn, and the single-minded thematic focus produces a strong similarity to Vegemite. Small dips are quite enough.

We demand difference and variety in our lives – in the food we eat, in our friends, in our distractions and aversions. And we know that diversity is desperately needed in the biological world. There is debate, however, on how much is enough, and where the balance lies, and it’s hard to judge because we remain ignorant about natural processes.

My own garden pays homage to Joseph Banks, the great botanist, whose passion was collecting plants from the New World and taking them back to England’s green and pleasant land. More and more plants were moved around for economic and aesthetic reasons. Those following Banks’s example inadvertently created a new problem, the homogenisation of regions. Consequently, eclectic gardens like mine are under siege by the native-plant brigade: ‘Those ring-in plants crowding out the local species.’ I have become, in the gimlet gaze of my critics, a weed grower, my garden a source of the next biological escape, the next outbreak of feral plants.