‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in’, declared Jane Austen, and so too do a number of Australian publishers. It is a commonplace that historians do not know how to write, except to each other in ways that put other readers to sleep. The first advice to the author of any newly minted doctoral dissertation preparing a book proposal is to eliminate all reference to the thesis. The starting point in any of the non-fiction writing programs offered at universities is to purge their manuscript of academic diction. ‘Sadly’, Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath begin their advice book on the subject, ‘historical writing has quite a bad reputation’.

Academic historians only took to urban history in any systematic way during the 1970s, but Melbourne, regardless of what historians might have had to say about it, has always had a strong sense of its own identity and culture. In the heyday of 1880s ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, journalist Richard Twopeny saw the city as representing ‘the fullest development of Australian civilisation, whether in commerce or education, in wealth or intellect, in manners and customs – in short, in every department of life’. English historian J.A. Froude, staying in style as a guest at Government House, saw Melbourne people as having ‘boundless wealth, and as bound-less ambition and self-confidence’; they were ‘proud of themselves and of what they have done’.

As with most literary journals, Heat 21 is a curate’s egg. Notably, Without A Paddle shines when in analytical-critical, essayistic mode. The poetry and fiction are rather more prosaic, with a few exceptions: Ken Bolton in fine form; Michael Hofmann’s beautifully spare poetry. Hofmann’s poem prefaces an extended interview with the poet and German-English translator; his responses are humble, full of sly humour.

Why do you write?

To make sense of the relations between my perceptions and my feelings.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, in general I am, but I have three kinds of dream: those that are dully bureaucratic at root; those that revisit the emblematic landscapes or cities of earlier dreams; and wild, coloured dreams with a green welcoming ocean or dark monsters.

‘My problem is that because of my anxiety disorder, publicity is close to torture,’ Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek tells Ben Naparstek, explaining why she informed a newspaper in 2004 that she hoped she wouldn’t be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (she was). With or without anxiety disorders, writers face a conundrum. They communicate through the written word, but increasingly they also talk aloud in public and in the media. When writers are interviewed, they often traverse an awkward middle ground between adopting a public persona and revealing the inner sources of their inspiration. There is a tension – frequently evident in the pages of In Conversation – between a writer’s need to publicise, explain or defend his or her works and beliefs, and a desire to allow the writing to speak for itself. For many writers, there is also the challenge of making their verbal communication as erudite as their writing. As Norwegian novelist Per Petterson tells Naparstek, ‘Talk is entirely overvalued, I think.’

Why do otherwise sane human beings decide to become music critics? It’s often to jump on the PR treadmill of free passes to gigs and free records for review. There’s the writer who wants to be closer to his idol, the careerist who sees it as one more step to editorial power, or the music junkie who’s compelled to make the leap from mute fanaticism to the written word.

If despair and desolation can be said to have had a high point in poetry in English during the modern era, it is in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly ‘The Hollow Men’. While reading Martin Langford’s remarkable The Human Project: New & Selected Poems, I was reminded of other poets whose reputations depend upon the discomforting poems they have written. The until recently neglected American poet Weldon Kees, who may or may not have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955, wrote about the underside of the American dream, its sterility, in a tone of unwavering bitterness, but his noirish imagination and technical brilliance make the poems compelling. Something similar could be said of the English poet Peter Reading, whose expression of undiminished anger is a result of his disgust with humanity, and its condition terminal, though his pervasive self-righteousness can be wearing.

A good detective series depends on the author’s ability to devise canny plots with attendant clues and blind alleys, but of greater importance is the central detective who acts as a charismatic guide through the miasma of murder and mystery. There are many compelling detectives in crime fiction: think of Inspector Maigret, Hercule Poirot, Adam Dalgliesh, Kay Scarpetta and Stephanie Plum. However, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and, more recently, Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, memorable couples are rare in the sleuthing game.

After a decade as an annual, the enduring Western Australian journal, Westerly, will now publish a ‘traditional’ issue midyear and a ‘creative’ issue later in the year. This début ‘creative’ issue includes Indigenous writing and art (mostly the former). Guest editors Sally Morgan and Blaze Kwaymullina have produced a collection that is entertaining, informative and diverse.

He polished his car to a shine, he kept
a ‘clean machine’ inside and out, but down
from ‘up north’, the red dirt would stay
in the seams of doors, around the fittings.
A detailing of distance. A truth unto itself.

What to do with us, having travelled
so far – the access-visit ontology, a divorced
bloke’s existential crisis. Kids aren’t going
to live on feelings alone for an afternoon,
they want entertainment. Time is action.

The zoo excursion undoes its own irony –
the cages more than conceits, more than
 allegories of maintenance and child support.
The babies of most species cling to their
mothers, and that’s got to hurt. The smell

is so prevalent – we called it ‘a stink’,
the kind we gave off when badly behaved
and told off, a fear reaction. We were brave
leaning in through iron bars thick as Dad’s arms,
knocking at the armour of the rhinoceros,

as wagtails picked insects off. Could it feel
their delicate feet? Its horn, worn down
to a stump, looked anything but mythical.
Rough skin fascinated us – the elephant’s,
the hippopotamus rolling in its baby bath.

The fairy penguins launched from their castle
into a moat of fast food, and that was a talking
point. Penguins and coke cans. Magical. Like
pythons in glass boxes or the smoking gorilla.
Time is action. And our dad glanced at his

watch out of anticipation. We didn’t get that.
We were too busy making metaphors. The mini
railway wound its way around the heartlands.
Safari. The sound of species lost since then.
 Zoological gardens. Family crisis centre.

The polar bear mauled someone who jumped
into its green waters. It leapt off its white ledges
 bothered by no melt, ate, and covered its bloody
 black nose. It happened before and after Dad
talked of its power. He liked the bears. And the cats.

He wanted us to like them. The big animals.
The big dads. Keep away from the edge,
he said in a way that meant more to us than
an excursion. Than entertainment. Than time.
Than the car he polished to a shine, red dirt.

I approached this readable and well-informed study expecting a middling book on a middling filmmaker. Michael Winterbottom is obviously a talented man by the standards of modern British commercial cinema, but I have always associated his work with a routine blend of fashionable technique and pious liberal sentiment. Nor did Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams raise my hopes with their introduction, in which they praise Winterbottom’s business sense and his avoidance of ‘high-flown accounts of what he is up to’. Above all, they seem impressed by the sheer industry of a director who has averaged one feature a year for the past decade and a half; however you judge him, ‘he does keep getting his films made’.

At the outset of Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy poses a thought experiment. Each year 1.6 billion passengers fly around the world. We do so with remarkable ease. Just imagine, Hrdy asks, if our fellow human passengers suddenly morphed into another species of ape. We would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached, or with any babies on board still alive. Bloody appendages would litter the aisles. It would be mayhem.

In the mid twentieth century, American television was dominated by two talking horses called Mr Ed. The first, the equine hero of a sitcom also called Mr Ed (catchier than his real name, Bamboo Harvester), twisted his mouth more or less in sync with a dubbed basso profondo voice. He had lots to say, mostly preceded by an often disdainful reference to his hapless owner, Wilbur, the only person Mr Ed talked to, whose name came out as ‘Will-BURRRRRRR!’. This mildly popular series ran for six seasons.

The press release for David Owen’s latest book describes it as a ‘thoroughly researched’ work by a shark ‘outsider’ that aims to ‘comprehensively overturn our negative and damaging perceptions of sharks’. I cannot claim expert knowledge of sharks, but personal experience makes me a suitable subject on which to measure the author’s effectiveness. When I was a child, one of my sisters was bitten in shallow water by a shark that had breached a netted beach in North Queensland. Although her injuries were not life-threatening, the resulting panic had a lasting effect: I rarely swim in the ocean, and have a healthy respect for sharks.

In the chapter ‘Revolutionary Terror’ in In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), world-renowned Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek briefly discusses Georgi M. Derluguian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (2005). Derluguian’s book traces the extraordinary career of one Musa Shanib, from Abkhazia on the Black Sea, who moved from being a Soviet dissident to a democratic political reformer and, finally, a Muslim fundamentalist, all the while maintaining an unwavering intellectual loyalty to the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Naturally, as Žižek recognises, it is easy for privileged Westerners to be fascinated by or patronisingly amused by someone from such a backwater claiming allegiance to a master from a cultural capital like Paris. As he writes, ‘What a strange choice, Bourdieu – who knows what this folkloric guy sees in Bourdieu?’ But Žižek’s point is that it is precisely only from such different perspectives, only through such cultural and geographical dislocations, that we are able to see what is valid about Bourdieu’s work. It is only through the hard labour of someone like Shanib trying to apply it to his own particular circumstances that we can discover what is truly universal about Bourdieu’s work.

Reading this passage, of course, it is hard not to think of Žižek himself. For it seems nothing less than a miracle that the obscure teachings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan found their greatest explicator in the ‘folkloric’ person of someone like Žižek. It appears almost impossible to explain how, in the small, backward, almost ‘oriental’ state of Slovenia under the communist rule of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, an intellectual revolution started in the mid-1970s that some twenty years later would sweep the West, leading to the overthrow of the deconstruction, post-colonialism, and political correctness that dominated academic discourse throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Now Žižek, along with the Frenchman Alain Badiou, has almost singlehandedly brought back not only psychoanalysis and Marxism but, less abstractly, arguments for universality as opposed to multicultural plurality and for violent revolution and the capture of the civil state, as opposed to ironic subversion and passive resistance.

Alan Gould’s imagination has been steeped in a wide range of reading, from Shakespeare, Milton, Kipling, and Auden to less well-known works such as the sophisticated verse of the Cavalier poets. His recent novel, The Lake Woman, also reveals the influence of the tough and tender lyricism of Thomas Wyatt.

Gould’s literary voice is unusual among contemporary writers, partly as a result of his influences. Although he claimed his own territory as a fiction writer a long time ago (his first novel, The Man Who Stayed Below, appeared in 1984), and has always been interested in idiomatic Australian English and Australian culture, he also allied himself to the chief storytellers, such as Conrad, among the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English-language modernists. As a result, a few of his literary mannerisms – including his diction and some of his cadences – can seem old-fashioned. This should not matter; good writing will always outlast passing fashions, but it may be one reason why Gould’s fiction has been less widely noticed than it might have been.

Further, the task that Gould has set himself, and largely achieved – to be equally proficient as a poet, novelist, and essayist – is an unusual one among contemporary Australian authors, notwithstanding David Malouf’s protean achievements. It has meant that his dedicated readers have had to grapple with a variety of genres, at least one of them – Gould’s poetry – foregrounding a complex and eddying sensibility that has not always been easily approachable, despite his writing’s narrative impetus.

Think of John Brack, or Fred Williams, and without effort or prompting a painting will come to mind. These names conjure up Brack’s urban figures with their blank yet expressive faces, or Williams’ minimalist landscapes. Instantly recognisable, they could have been painted by no one else. Yet their makers have never been celebrities. Brack’s Collins St, 5p.m. is more widely known than Brack the painter. Fred Williams always seemed too absorbed in his work to turn his face to the public. A portly figure in a suit, he was no one’s image of an artist. Arthur Boyd, so one of his friends wryly remarked, ‘sometimes backed shyly into the limelight’, but he was happiest away from the public gaze. Although the popular acclaim of the Ned Kelly paintings might well have obscured their creator, Sidney Nolan was tough and confident enough to emerge into a blaze of publicity (expertly kindled by John and Sunday Reed) and to withdraw when he pleased.

In Clifton Pugh, the personality is on show, and in spite of the quality of much of his work, he is best remembered for an exuberant way of life, with never-ending parties at his artists’ commune in semi-rural Victoria, his three marriages and many affairs, his commitment to the environment and Aboriginal rights, in which he was ahead of his time, and his political activism.

In her substantial biography After Fire, Sally Morrison struggles to interpret a man of contradictions and to chronicle his overcrowded life. It appears so soon after Judith Pugh’s Unstill Life: Art, Politics and Living with Clifton Pugh (2008) that its usefulness might be questioned. But Judith Pugh, third wife of the artist, limited her book to the ten years she spent as muse, model, and manager at the mudbrick house at Cottles Bridge (named, with self-conscious ockerism, Dunmoochin), and on Pugh’s overseas travels. Her book is memoir, not biography, and she makes no apologies for placing herself in the foreground.

In September 2009, Treasurer Wayne Swan revealed that Australia’s population of twenty-two million was growing much faster than anticipated. Just three years ago, the Intergenerational Report 2007 projected a population of twenty-eight and a half million in 2047. Treasury now expects the population to exceed thirty-five million people by 2049, an increase of almost sixty per cent. This forecast had to be revised because of the combined effect of an increase in the fertility rate of Australian women (a mini baby boom) and increased migration.

How will Australia accommodate an extra thirteen million residents over the next forty years? Sydney and Melbourne will increase in size by fifty per cent to become cities of seven million people, while Brisbane and Perth will double their numbers to have four million and three and a half million residents, respectively. Can we manage to supply everyone with water, power, housing, and transport while protecting what is left of Australia’s natural environment and dramatically cutting our national greenhouse gas emissions? Treasury Secretary Ken Henry is personally pessimistic about Australia’s capacity to manage this population increase, and federal MP Kelvin Thomson warns that we are ‘sleepwalking into an environmental disaster’.

This puts them at odds with the prime minister. Kevin Rudd believes in a big Australia. He declared, in a recent speech, that it is ‘Good for our national security. Good for our long-term prosperity. Good in enhancing our role in the region and the world.’ Exactly how a larger population improves our national security or diplomatic prestige is unclear, but the link to economic growth (as conventionally conceived) is far more obvious. It is hard to envisage Australia’s economy without an increasing population. Just think of the housing industry and its reliance on ever-expanding suburban boundaries.

In the introduction to this latest Best Australian Stories, Delia Falconer – in her second and, she advises, last year as editor – contends that the short story has greater affinities with the poem and the essay than with the novel. She rightly identifies the story as often ‘misunderstood in the public imagination as a kind of less demanding novel-in-miniature’. Stories, Falconer argues, are akin to poems in ‘picking their moment’ rather than working in the novel’s ‘great swathes of time’. The short story advances an argument in the way of an essay, while ‘artfully [hiding] its workings’.

Short fiction’s affinities with poetry and the essay are amply demonstrated in the fine opening story by Gail Jones. Indeed, ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ has characteristics we might more popularly associate with the poem, in the lyricism of its main protagonist’s melancholy sojourn in Venice (‘She watches the snow fall, soft and spotted as improvised musical notation’); and with the essay in passages that capture J.M.W. Turner’s late visits to that vaporous city. But although Jones’s story alludes to Venice’s long history of opulence and degradation, and the protagonist’s shorter history of her relationship with her departed lover, the action, or meditation, is circumscribed by a short stay in Venice, and makes an argument for the inevitability of replication and of loss and death.

The flyer for the Brisbane launch of this new biography of Australia’s most popular living poet described Stephany Evans Steggall and Bruce Dawe as ‘joint authors’, and while the title page lists Evans Steggall alone as its author, there is a sense in which the poet is indeed co-author of this collaborative account of his life. The title comes from one of his best-known poems, and the chapters take their titles from the poems with which they begin. Evans Steggall has also reordered poems written over many decades into a chronological sequence that enables the poet himself to tell much of his life story. She has added to this her own complementary account of that life, in which she has been assisted by the poet who, instead of writing his autobiography, has chosen to collaborate with his biographer. Such a venture has its constraints, which are increased when the subject is involved in the writing, but it also offers opportunities that the objectifying passage of time removes. In this case, the collaboration has produced an intimately personal account of a notable life viewed sympathetically and through the poet’s own eyes.

The beginning was not auspicious. Mary Ann Dawe was fifty-four when Bruce was born in 1930, twenty-two years after his nearest sibling, George. Work was scarce in the Depression and Bruce’s father was often absent, leaving George to act as a surrogate father. For her account of these difficult early years, Evans Steggall draws on the poet’s sometimes sketchy memories, school records and ‘Beggar’s Velvet’, a memoir George wrote many years later and which Bruce transcribed and edited. These tell of family hardship and frequent changes of lodgings, including some ‘moonlight flits’, during the ‘cramped and drab penurious years’ revisited by Dawe in the poem ‘Drifters’.

Towards the end of the fourth century BCE, the Athenian orator Hyperides found himself in a difficult predicament. His client, the notorious courtesan Phryne, was on trial for her life. Facing accusations of lewd impiety, should she be convicted, death almost certainly would follow. The case was going badly. The jurors were refusing to listen to his pleas. Their minds were made up. They couldn’t wait to convict. In one last desperate roll of the dice, Hyperides called up Phryne to the front of the courtroom and, with a sudden lunge, stripped her naked. The jury were shocked, stunned into silence. Seizing the moment, Hyperides renewed his pleas on her behalf. Overcome by her beauty, the jury acquitted her.

This story of courtroom antics was a popular one in antiquity. It is recounted with only minor variations in a number of our ancient texts. We no longer possess the speech that Hyperides gave on Phryne’s behalf, but we know that versions circulated in Greece and Rome for an eager readership. This story also enjoyed an active afterlife in the visual arts. From the Renaissance onwards, painters have been attracted by the subject matter. It promises both voyeuristic pleasure and, for an artist, a satisfying allegory. Here is a tale about how beauty triumphs over logic and argument. It is a story about the failure of words and the triumph of art. For these reasons, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s celebrated painting of the scene makes a slightly odd choice as the cover image of Erik Gunderson’s edited collection on ancient rhetoric. For if they show nothing else, this collection of essays demonstrates that, far from being a failure, rhetoric was absolutely crucial to the dynamism of life in the ancient metropolis. Demosthenes once described Athens as ‘a city composed of speeches’. One could extend the idea and claim that civic life for the entirety of the ancient world was constructed out of nothing but artfully crafted words. The book concludes by examining the impact of classical rhetoric on early Christianity and the Renaissance. Ancient rhetoric, it turns out, has a long reach.

Welcome to Moriarty country. This is our fourth visit to Ashbury High, in New South Wales, which is peopled with smart, sassy teenagers given to commenting on their lives and those of their friends, family, and teachers in many modes and many (far too many this time) words. Moriarty has been tracking three of these private-school girls since Year Nine. Now they are tackling Year Twelve.

Meet Emily Melissa-Anne Thompson: ‘The plot thickens! (Which is very gothic of it.) … Lightning struck! There was a howling wind, as if wolves roamed about, howlingly.’ And Lydia Jaackson-Oberman: ‘You know the expression on the gothic villain’s face? The scene where he wants the heroine to sign away her fortune (plus her hand in marriage and the life of her favourite puppy dog)?’ And Cassie, who has no narrative role here, though we hear from her via email.

Moriarty frames, scatters, sends up, and pretty well spooks what is essentially a school story with Gothic elements, as above. Why? Because these students are all taking the elective Gothic Fiction and preparing for the following exam question: ‘Write a personal memoir which explores the dynamics of first impressions. In your response, draw on your knowledge of gothic fiction.’

Another main character, the unhappy Tobias Mazzerati, appeared in The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie (2006). Here, he adds a different voice and dimension as he labours over an essay with deeply Gothic features about an Irish convict lad, Tom Kincaid, whose sad history and involvement in an uprising play out on the blasted heath of the Castle Hill of yore. Castle Hill is where the exclusive Ashbury High is located, and there are some links to the past. Another strand – almost a running gag – through Dreaming of Amelia is the complex subject of black holes. Here is Tobias’s take on this:

In Ghostly Subjects, her first book-length collection, Maria Takolander brings a sharp, wide-ranging voice to various themes of haunting. What, after all, does it mean for a subject to be ghostly? Takolander reveals a fasci-nation with the ways that surfaces of many kinds might be disrupted within the poetic text – for example, the ways in which the present can be interrupted by the pressures of the past, or an external geography of landscape by the private desires of the heart, or the stage of global events by the graspable scale of the local. And as these boundaries blur and suffuse, Takolander’s poetry suggests that the subject is not only the world under the scrutiny of the poet’s eye, but also the subjectivities of poet and reader, both drawn into these shifting spheres of light, shadow, and surprise.

In the opening poem, ‘Geography Lessons’, Takolander considers the crucial relationship between the natural world and the poet–observer: ‘How a river /… [might] call you by your secret name, / the one only your mirror knows’, or how one might ‘adopt [the ocean’s] colossal anger as your own / and live believing it is all something personal’. This relation poses a question that ‘haunts’ much recent eco-poetic and post-romantic writing – can the world be observed and transformed within the imaginative alchemy of the poem without doing it violence, or without a naïve and narcissistic misunderstanding that the world is us and that we are the world? Indeed, does the poet write the subject inductively across the alterity of the world, or is the only way to begin to understand the world to incorporate it, devouring and giving birth to it in endless cycle? ‘Your mouth gives you life, / And, oh, you could live for it’, Takolander writes in ‘Narcissism’. While the collection offers many vistas of the observing eye, it is perhaps actually the mouth – that bivalve between self and world, which ‘Bite[s], chew[s], suck[s], swallow[s], fuck[s]’ – that Takolander offers as a principal poetic ‘organ’, here a feminised and active body which consumes the ideas and the images of the external world, in a powerful and visceral version of creation. As the poem ‘Alien Subjects’ puts it, rather sensually and elegiacally, ‘For finally we are mouths, the gently ravenous.’

I first came to Hobart just over three years ago, to take up a job. Unencumbered and ready for an adventure, I thought nothing of agreeing to the post without ever having visited the Tasmanian capital (or Tasmania, for that matter). The job advertisement included the promise of an ‘idyllic lifestyle’, which sounded pretty good to me.

‘Idyllic’ was hardly the word that came to mind during my first twenty-four hours or so in Hobart. The roadkill on the journey from the airport to the CBD didn’t get things off to a good start, and a sinking feeling hit my stomach when the bleak outer suburbs came into view. Even the city’s backdrop, Mount Wellington, failed to impress, looking more bovine than imposing. As the taxi crossed the Tasman Bridge, I glanced upstream and saw the smoking hulk of the zinc smelter, which took me completely by surprise (somehow I didn’t count on Hobart having heavy industry). When the cab came to a halt at a set of lights in the CBD, the harmonious sandstone façades of the ‘historic Hobart’ of my imagination were nowhere to be seen. Instead, I cast my eyes across an intersection dominated by some of the ugliest built structures I had ever encountered. I know my Jane Austen, but, even so, was mightily unnerved by these first impressions.

Over the next few days, I explored the city on foot. While I was shocked by the scale and impact of unsympathetic architecture and taken aback by the citizens’ indifference to sartorial style, I came to realise that it was better to imbibe Hobart slowly and carefully than to slam it down in one thirsty, reckless gulp. The beauty, as it turned out, was in the detail. There might be nothing particularly attractive about the shopfronts in Elizabeth Street, as they march up the hill from the CBD towards North Hobart, but some of the stores themselves are gems, none more so than the CWA shop. The mere fact of its existence pleased me.

This is a poignant and beautifully presented work about a community most Australians have lived alongside for decades without enquiring about the lives of its members. Reading it should jolt us out of our complacency.

Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora is the product of a project financed by the Australian Research Council and undertaken by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, herself a refugee. Between 2005 and 2008 she and two co-workers (Boitran Huynh-Beattie and Thao Ha) recorded confidential oral testimony from forty-two Vietnamese women living in Australia, who are referred to only by their first names. They come from a range of different backgrounds, in terms of age, class and district, but all of them fled war and political upheaval before prolonged and painful transitions to Australia. Their narratives cover generations of war and its aftermath, from the French and Japanese occupations to American intervention and the 1975 fall of Saigon, and life in re-education camps thereafter. Many of the women made multiple escape attempts before reaching Australia – fourteen, in one case.

The role of memory has long been accepted as central to the healing of trauma. Nguyen’s meticulous presentation of these mostly sad and sometimes shocking personal histories shows us this process at work. Memory is the tapestry on which the traumatised re-work their lives through countless narratives of explanation and adjustment, reconstructing identities threatened with fragmentation by imprisonment, torture, horrors witnessed, and ordeals endured.

For the trauma survivor, the re-shaping of identity is often related to the destruction of family or childhood records. Nguyen notes: ‘Many South Vietnamese households destroyed family photographs and documents in the closing days of the war – a loss that was irretrievable.’ Her first chapter, entitled ‘Lost Photographs’, underlines the centrality of lost images to refugees and their eventual reworking into each person’s narrative. She quotes American-Vietnamese writer Andrew Lam, who is haunted by the memory of destroying photographs in Saigon on his mother’s orders, and who has since worked to recover the images in other forms. ‘Precious things lost are transmutable,’ he wrote. ‘They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into testimonies, into stories and songs.’

Few academics, policy analysts or politicians can see any humour in climate change. It is as if the doomsday prediction that our civilisation will one day self-destruct as a consequence of global warming has already, perversely, closed down the possibilities for lighter, more creative responses to one of the most urgent issues of our time. To acknowledge a humorous side to catastrophe is not, however, to deny the reality of global dangers. For humour, as Sigmund Freud underscored, is crafty, clever, streetwise, and implacable. How many climate change sceptics does it take to change a lightbulb? None – it’s too early to say if the light bulb needs changing.

Anthony Giddens is, on balance, extravagantly optimistic about humanity’s prospects for reversing climate change. Not that bringing optimism to the debate on climate change is how Giddens would exactly see it. His book pulls no punches; he begins by declaring that at present ‘we have no politics of climate change’. Climate change for Giddens suggests that the world urgently needs political innovations, beyond the confines of orthodox politics and ones capable of addressing the global risks of greenhouse gas emissions. ‘We must create,’ writes Giddens, ‘a positive model of a low-carbon future.’

Blending the dangers of global warming with possibilities for new low-carbon technologies and utopian strands of cosmopolitan politics, Giddens emerges at various points in The Politics of Climate Change as a full-blooded optimist. Certainly, he isn’t one to shy away from humour or irony in order to find better motivations for women and men to confront climate change in their daily lives. His vision is one emphasising ‘climate change positives’. As he says, Martin Luther King didn’t stir people to action by proclaiming ‘I have a nightmare!’

All political tracts on climate change are timely, but some are more timely than others. Whilst political analyses of climate change have taken different forms, the large bulk have emphasised that globally catastrophic processes are at work. From one angle, this is hardly surprising. As global temperatures in the twenty-first century are expected by the international scientific community to rise by four to seven degrees celsius, rather than the previously predicted two to three, it is increasingly evident to many that we are fast approaching the end of the world as we know it.

In 1887 Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Kidnapped (1886) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), left England for the sake of his declining health. By the end of 1889 he was living in Samoa. The British reading public adored Stevenson, and reactions in the press to his immersion in the complicated politics of his new home ranged from irritation to incomprehension. When the sequel to Kidnapped, Catriona (or David Balfour), was published in 1893, they rejoiced in the restoration of ‘their RLS’. One reviewer wrote, ‘Write as many sequels to “Kidnapped” as you wish, and we will read them with zest, but do not tell us anything more about Samoa.’

At the same time, the sentimental legend of Stevenson as ‘Tusitala’ (popularly mistranslated as ‘The Teller of Tales’ rather than the more sober ‘Write-information’) obscured the reality of Stevenson’s life in the Pacific with a romantic vision of a white man charming unsophisticated islanders with his storytelling prowess.

However hard he tried to impress on his readers the abuses of power that he observed in Samoa, he could make no headway. As a writer, they wanted him to be the Scottish novelist they loved; as an inhabitant of the South Seas, they wanted Tusitala, an ‘easily grasped image’ which domesticated a complex existence in an unfamiliar society. Roslyn Jolly’s book Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, empire and the author’s profession is expressly written ‘against the simplifying, smoothing, reductive powers of that myth’.

Over the past three decades, Peter Beilharz has carved out an important space in Australian social and socialist theory. Co-founder of the journal Thesis Eleven, Beilharz’s work ranges from studies of Australian labourism and European social democracy to more general works in socialist and social democratic theory. Alongside these he has written two important works addressing the themes of culture and modernity. One of them is a study of Bernard Smith (Imagining the Antipodes, 1997) and the other is on the Polish émigré sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000). The essays collected in Beilharz’s latest volume cover much of his intellectual journey over a period of twenty-five years ‘from socialism, to modernity, via Americanism’, as he titles his introduction. Beilharz well understands that the art of the essay is conversation rather than argument, raising possibilities rather than seeking a single answer. All the essays – engaging, learned, and undogmatic – reflect the kind of pluralistic and open-ended politics that Beilharz is concerned to promote.

One of the central themes in Socialism and Modernity is intellectual recovery. Beilharz wants to remind us of the pluralistic nature of the socialist tradition. This is easy to forget, given the way the Bolshevik experience dominates our understanding of socialism and, in the process, forecloses other alternatives. Likewise, while Marx remains the dominant theoretical presence in the history of socialism, Marxism is simply one tradition among many. The simple identification of Marxism with Bolshevism is problematic: ‘Marx might have generated some mischief, but he was no Bolshevik.’ According to Beilharz, there are at least five competing visions of the good society in Marx’s thought, ranging from the romantic and pastoral to the productivist, which welcomes the creative energies of capitalism as leading the way to the land of plenty.

The conflicts within Marx can perhaps be thought of as representative of socialism as a whole, since ‘from the beginning … socialists have been active in dispute as to whether socialism involves more progress or modernity or less’. Beilharz, then, is concerned with socialism as an ongoing critical dialogue with modernity, rather than with capitalism as such. This helps him to pluralise the socialist tradition and to put Marx in perspective: ‘To become open to modernity is simultaneously to place or limit Marxism and also to register the profundity of its critical claims.’ Along with Marx, these essays contain illuminating discussions of many of the important figures in modern socialism, from Eduard Bernstein, Edward Bellamy, and Karl Kautsky to Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, and Bauman and Donald Sassoon.

Don’t be put off by the subtitle. This is not a work driven by some New Age personification of Nature. If you’re looking for a gloss on the one-word title, you might focus instead on the inspired austerity of the cover photograph: Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point, by Ansel Adams. Then again, the book contains no mention of Ansel Adams, or of Glacier Point. During the course of the chapters, many inspiring and extraordinary places are visited, but this is not one of them.

I greatly enjoyed reading Source, but there are some issues about what holds it together as a study of the creative process. It is ‘a fine thing to write about what you love, and to go to places where it was made’, Janine Burke says in her introduction. The book includes chapters on Georgia O’Keefe, Pablo Picasso, Karen Blixen, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Ernest Hemingway, Claude Monet, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Burke’s research on their impassioned attachment to place took her to the Kenyan plains overlooked by Mount Kilimanjaro, through the Chama Canyon to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, to the Côte d’Azur, Long Island, and Utopia, in the Australian Central Desert. Nice work if you can get it, though, of course, such work isn’t given out; it’s created, and has its own source in a vision to be communicated.

Part of this book’s appeal is that it enables an intoxicating form of virtual tourism. I couldn’t help being seduced by the evocation of those landscapes, and of the smaller-scale locations – the rooms, studios, gardens – inhabited by epoch-changing artists on whom they had a transformational effect. Burke, an art historian, works a particular kind of alchemy through the overlay of natural description with aesthetic commentary.

Each day, O’Keefe explored the peaks, canyons, mesas and plains of Ghost Ranch, the ancient, wind-bitten landscape with its extraordinary palette of colours – gold, blood, mauve, orange. The atmosphere’s brilliant clarity amplified the precision with which [she] represented form.

A purveyor of second-hand literature-cum-reluctant sleuth is an attractive proposition. We first met Jack Susko in Lenny Bartulin’s first novel, A Deadly Business (2008). Susko, a one-time employee of the notorious Ziggy Brandt, had finally established a legitimate (albeit struggling) business, Susko Books. Rarely troubled by customers, Susko was entertained by the music of Miles Davis and Muddy Waters, and alcohol.

One day, tempted by an easy buck, Susko began hunting for the works of an award-winning poet and was soon dragged into a puzzling family saga, with the usual suspects: jealous husbands, disinherited siblings, unfaithful spouses, vengeful children. Toss in a crooked detective and a couple of murders, and Susko wished he had never opened the shop that morning.

Bartulin’s narrative, though compelling, is nothing like the genre fiction of, say, Peter Temple, who tackles so exceptionally well larger issues such as police and political corruption, indigenous politics, and the overdevelopment of coastal regions. There is not much lyricism in Bartulin’s prose, either, though he is a published poet. In fact, with all the hard-boiled tough-talking (imitative of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain), you begin to wonder if Bartulin’s bent is more towards parody. Outside the milieux of the police force and the private detective bureau, this vernacular at times reads hilariously – Susko, in the new novel, is ‘sweating like a drycleaner at the steam press during Business Shirt Week’.

While there isn’t much self-awareness to this prose, there is something absorbing about The Black Russian, as there was, to a greater extent, to A Deadly Business. Part of this magnetism lies in the portrayal of Susko, a clueless and susceptible hero who somehow manages to be charismatic.

A suitable motto for any prospective compiler of a large-scale history of a national literature might be ‘No Place for a Nervous Editor’ (to adapt the title of Lucy Frost’s study of nineteenth-century women’s journals). A few of the portentous questions for this imagined figure include: how is ‘literature’ to be conceptualised at the beginning of the twenty-first century (witness the Balkan culture war that followed the publication of the estimably inclusive Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, 2009); how to balance the different needs and competencies of readers – students at tertiary and secondary level, academic specialists from various disciplines, a diverse non-Australian audience; how to choose contributors who combine scholarly authority with an ability to write jargon-free language for a diverse readership; how to construct a book that will satisfy both the searcher for information about a particular book or topic and the (probably rare) reader who wants to proceed from cover to cover?

Peter Pierce is to be congratulated on finding satisfactory answers to all of these questions. The Cambridge History is indeed a new kind of history of Australian literature, concerned as much with discussing specific books and periods as with placing its various subjects within appropriate cultural, political, and theoretical contexts. Pierce quotes Harry Heseltine’s witticism about Laurie Hergenhan’s Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) – ‘it was hard to see the trees for the wood’. His own volume is a commendable balancing act between the conceptual and the specific; the author-study and the cultural taxonomy.

The History has a thoughtful quadripartite structure, which invites the reader to move backwards and forwards between contributions. The first two sections (comprising half of the twenty-four chapters) are concerned with colonial literature and ideas of literature, and with developments from Federation to 1950. The fourth section explores writing and cultural history from 1950 to ‘nearly now’. A reader of, say, Dennis Haskell’s thought-provoking essay on post-1950 Australian poetry might well be drawn back to Peter Kirkpatrick’s examination of poetry and popular culture from 1890 to 1950, and from there to Vivian Smith’s well-informed but rather more conventional essay on colonial poetry, in the first section. This is a journey that might well be taken in the other direction, of course.

This highly ambitious first novel exists within a fine web of literary influences and allusions. The publisher invites comparisons to The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s novel set in a university Classics department. The novel’s narrator, Julia, a student enthralled by the glamorous, moneyed family of a classmate, echoes that of Brideshead Revisited. Self-conscious references to detective noir and nineteenth-century romance novels abound. All of these comparisons have some merit, but another takes precedence, not only flavouring the text, but providing a skeleton for the characters and plot.

First and foremost, The Legacy is a contemporary update of Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady, with the action shifting from a Europe beset by travelling Americans, to Sydney and New York. In a thoroughly contemporary twist, its unhappily married heroine disappears from the World Trade Centre site on 9/11.

Bright, beautiful Ingrid, informally adopted by her wealthy aunt after her mother’s death, is transplanted from distant Perth to Sydney. There, she is worshipped by her new family, particularly her doting uncle George and besotted invalid cousin, Ralph – who secretly convinces his ailing father to leave her a fortune. ‘With this inheritance, [George] really had bought a role for himself as the executive producer of whatever she chose to do next.’ And Ralph is ‘instrumental in achieving it’. What she chooses, to the disquiet of all onlookers, is to marry Gilbert Grey, a man of exquisite taste but no warmth or compassion, whose lack of affection for her she misconstrues as admirable restraint. The match is carefully engineered by a family friend, Maeve, who is strangely close to both Gil and his daughter, Fleur, a child prodigy painter. (‘It was just as though Maeve had handed Grey a gift.’)

Some stories are very familiar to us, as a society, stories whose ugly truths we seem to have accepted, may even have, belatedly, apologised for, but the story of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams, as told by Peter Read, reveals how much White Australia still has to learn about the complexity of our national past and the tragedy of its continuing legacy. Eileen Williams, three weeks after her birth in 1943, was sent to the United Aborigines Mission Home at Bomaderry, where she was renamed Joy. She grew up in state institutions and was later incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, spending many years struggling with alcohol and drugs. As a young woman she had a baby taken from her, a repetition of the trauma inflicted on her mother and her grandmother. Joy, a poet and activist, mounted a long and unsuccessful lawsuit against the New South Wales state government. She died of cancer, alone, in 2006.

These biographical facts, sociologically common and personally catastrophic, are summarised in the introduction to Tripping over Feathers. The body of Read’s text then tells Joy’s story by imaginatively reconstructing key scenes in her life, working backwards chronologically from her funeral to the revelation of her unmarried mother’s pregnancy.

Read’s approach is refreshing. In the preface to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey decried the tradition of the Standard Biography, ‘two fat volumes ... of undigested masses of material’. Yet many contemporary biographers continue to value detail above insight. Read’s use of specific scenes in place of a seamless narrative mirrors the process of individual self-construction, in which memory cordons off pivotal moments from the ceaseless stream of life. Stylistically, Tripping over Feathers echoes the shift from heavy nineteenth-century naturalism to the vivid succinctness of an impressionistic landscape.

In working backwards, Read says his intent was to give an immediate sense of ‘this difficult, traumatised, sad, funny, intelligent and loving personality’. He succeeds. The reader has the impression of being taken on an archaeological journey, progressively unearthing the layers of abuse and injustice that shaped a woman who feared at the end that if she started crying she would ‘never stop’.

Why ‘Wyatt’? An evocative enough name for an Australian career criminal, but evocative of what, or whom? Of Wyatt Earp, perhaps, another gunman and homicide, if occasionally and famously on the right side of the law? Or Sir Thomas Wyatt, Tudor courtier, sensitive lover, diplomat and poet, who witnessed the execution of Anne Boleyn while himself a prisoner in the Tower of London? Garry Disher’s Wyatt has been in prison, and witnessed many deaths; indeed, facilitated some of them.

Possibly it is because Disher’s criminal’s name contains, homophonically, that interrogative adverb, ‘why?’. It’s rather like calling a character ‘Cipher’ (or ‘Wylie Sypher’, though that was the name of an actual American scholar) or ‘Marlowe’ or ‘Bond’ or ‘Villani’. In Paydirt (1992), Wyatt muses upon his own ‘coldness’, without stooping to propose a rationale. In The Fallout (1997), Wyatt ‘went in carefully, checking corners, checking the shadows. Wyatt lived in corners and shadows and that’s where the end of the world would come for him.’ At the end of The Fallout, Wyatt, wounded, ‘heard whispering footfalls in the grass, possibly the wind, and lay himself on the damp, rotting leaves to wait for Liz Redding, or possibly sleep, to claim him’. In the cold, in corners, in shadows, in the damp, that’s where the ‘why?’ in Wyatt insists upon itself, and stays not for a reply.

Disher has been dishing up Wyatt for two decades now, so it is perhaps inevitable that a certain tiredness seems to be creeping in, and not in Wyatt the character alone, though he certainly is ageing. In the new book, which concerns a heist gone wrong, the career criminal realises that ‘technology had outstripped him. He no longer had the skills to bypass hi-tech security systems or intercept electronic transfers.’ He is thus obliged ‘to carry out small-scale hold-ups and burglaries’. Disher’s novels, so often registering social change, demonstrate that even criminals get the blues.

ON CLOUDSTREET

When we sought readers’ nominations for the ABR Favourite Australian Novel of any era or genre, we anticipated goodly interest in the poll, partly because we know you are a well-read and passionate bunch, but also because Oxford University Press and Penguin had offered us a couple of outstanding prizes to complement our three-year subscription to the magazine.