Waiting on a reeking strange
     railway station –
then the dead-quiet but crowded
     night ferry.

Not since I was four or five at most
and in the first of many striped tee-shirts
have I been this close to the flavour of safety.
I’m walking into town again, the child of hills.
You bought me fish and chips for lunch, my own
adult portion because I asked for it, in Evans’s
tiled restaurant, the Alhambra of takeaways.

Edward Gough Whitlam bestrode the Australian political stage like a colossus for over a generation: first as federal Opposition leader, then as prime minister, and finally as martyr. A legend in his own lifetime, this last role threatens to turn him into myth. More books have been written on aspects of his short and turbulent government than on any other in Australian history. There are already three biographies: a competent quickie by journalist Laurie Oakes in 1976; an eloquent political biography by his speechwriter Graham Freudenberg in 1977; and a psychobiography by the political scientist James Walter in 1980, which depicts Whitlam in terms of a particular personality type – the grandiose narcissist.

Jenny Hocking’s first volume on Whitlam’s life falls into three roughly equal parts: family and early life (1916–52); parliamentary apprenticeship (1952–67); and leader of the Opposition (1967–72). Or the book may be seen as consisting of two halves: the critical turning point being the sudden emergence of Whitlam as a major political figure with his unexpected election as deputy leader in March 1960.

In 1977, in three consecutive issues, the New Yorker published Hannah Arendt’s ‘Thinking’. Each part was called an ‘article’, a strangely modest, journalistic word in the face of the length of each part of the essay and the profound subject. Thirty-two years ago, the magazine showed curmudgeonly modesty: writers were named in small print at the foot of each ‘piece’, there was never, god forbid, a sub-editor’s catch-all under the title, no short biographies of the writers were printed, and there were never, ever, visual illustrations or photographs to accompany the text. The issue in which the first of Arendt’s ‘articles’ appeared included poetry by Mark Strand; the long book review was by George Steiner; Pauline Kael was the film reviewer; there were four Saul Steinberg drawings; and Andrew Porter reported on classical music. The list of names we revere could go on.

In 1985, the year he bought the New Yorker and placed it under Condé Nast’s masthead, S.I. Newhouse Jr visited Australia and ate at Berowra Waters Inn, which I owned at the time. In a fit of pathetic supplication, I knelt (I swear I did) at his feet and begged him not to change the magazine. He laughed, moved on – so too the world. Over the next decade the magazine did change, especially under Tina Brown. Photographs appeared, fashion raised its ugly but sometimes interesting head, the contributors began to be made much more of, their names appearing at the top of their articles, and their past relevant performances listed. Nevertheless, excellent critics, reporters and thinkers, fine poets and writers of fiction continued to contribute, and there is still a steely attention to proofreading and fact. Its current editor, David Remnick, has my confidence; forty years on from that first subscription, I’m still hooked.

In December 1982, publisher Richard Walsh commissioned a ‘life and times of Miles Franklin’ from historian Jill Roe. The book ‘has been a long time coming’, says Roe, ‘due to other commitments and responsibilities, and because of the extent of previously unexamined source material.’ That source material – letters, articles, unpublished manuscripts, journals – exists in quantities that can be inferred from Roe’s comment near the end of the book, where she is describing Franklin’s final illness: that ‘from 1 January 1909 to 1 January 1954, there is some kind of record of what Miles Franklin was doing on virtually every day of her life.’

In his famous but tendentious 1989 essay ‘The End of History’, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that ‘we may be witnessing ... not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history’. A similar proposition might well have been made about Australian military history. By 1989 the great era of Australian military history seemed to have passed. The centrepieces of this era were the two world wars, which were so large, bloody and traumatic that they seemed destined to dominate the subject for many decades to come. What came before – the New Zealand Wars, Sudan, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Boer War – were seen as preliminary or preparatory episodes, or, as the title of one book on Sudan put it, ‘The Rehearsal’. The conflicts that followed World War II were postscripts. The performances and sacrifices of Australians in Korea, Malaya, Borneo, and Vietnam were measured against the earlier experiences of the world wars. All of Australia’s senior commanders in Vietnam had served in World War II, while most of the younger fighters there were the sons of World War II veterans.

Australian conservatism, for all its political dominance, is little understood and has been studied by surprisingly few scholars. The very industrious and perceptive Peter van Onselen is almost single-handedly determined to correct this imbalance. He has brought together a timely collection of essays on the Liberal Party and its future, coinciding with yet another term in unaccustomed opposition, an experience invariably chastising for the conservatives. The immediate predecessors to the modern-day Liberal Party on the non-Labor side of politics disintegrated on losing office, and the Liberal Party’s own spells in opposition have been periods of both blood-letting and soul searching. There is a happy focus (for the Liberal Party, at least) on the latter in this necessarily mixed bag.

Tucked inside a plastic sleeve affixed to the inside front cover of this handsome, large-format book is a video disc promising ‘The Best of Graham Kennedy’. Introduced by Stuart Wagstaff, the one hour of footage offers a compilation of Kennedy’s work for Channel Nine drawn from the early days of In Melbourne Tonight (1957–69) and The Graham Kennedy Show (1972–75). Most of the sketches, dance routines, advertising segments and encounters with the audience I had seen before. Rover the Wonder Dog peeing on a camera while refusing to spruik Pal dog food has become part of the collective memory of Kennedy’s contrived mayhem, revisited whenever television (especially Channel Nine) embarks on one of those moments of self-memorialisation with which it marks each milestone. There was, however, one early IMT sketch I had not seen. Rosie Sturgess, wearing an apron, enters a kitchen set looking for Bubba. Bubba is under the table. Graham dressed as a baby in a bonnet is discovered and helped into a chair which Sturgess needs to move closer to the table for the sketch to proceed. She tries to lift the chair with Kennedy in it. She can’t shift it or him. Sturgess looks helplessly at Kennedy. Kennedy smirks impishly back. Things are not going as planned. Or are they? I started to laugh and kept on laughing for the duration of the sketch as the porridge flew and the milk sprayed while the tears ran down my cheeks.

In one of these beautifully crafted prose poems, the speaker, recalling his childhood self, says that ‘I was gradually learning my own name, though there are times when the knowledge escapes me still, and another reveals itself’. This suggests complex trajectories of the self in time: self-knowledge comes ‘gradually’, but at times cedes to another, more profound, self-transcending form of knowing. Alex Skovron’s work, which includes four earlier volumes of verse and a novella, often counterposes two dispositions towards the self: a schematising impulse to ‘chart’ the ‘soul’, and a heuristic delight in the liberating processes of self-transcendence. Some of the ‘autographs’ – the accounts and traces of the self – that comprise this volume are of the first kind, others of the second. The book does not so much adjudicate between these kinds as embed them in a loose, fugue-like structure which is rich in delicate shadings, contrasts and variations. The book’s three sections – ‘Dance’, ‘Labyrinth’, and ‘Shadow’ – indicate axes of imaginative exploration rather than lines of narrative progression. Yet, cumulatively, the fifty-six poems in this collection nurture a passion for transcendence and a fear of excessive schematisation, the latter associated in this Jewish writer’s work with fundamentalism and totalitarianism.

My son Daniel’s African wedding took place in Lancashire – where his new Zambian in-laws live – a few days after the US presidential election. Barack Obama was not on the guest list, but his presence loomed so large that he might have been an extra, virtual, best man.

‘There is a joke in Kenya,’ Joseph Sikabbubba, a psychiatrist who was MC for the day, told me. ‘It is easier for a Lua to become president of the United States than president of Kenya.’

I know a little of Kenyan politics, which is dominated by the Kikuyu majority. Mutale, my new daughter-in-law, is a Bemba, but the wedding was a blend of various Zambian traditions, and Joseph told me that Zambia has so many tribes (the Africans freely use the unfashionable word, proscribed by the Guardian’s house-style manual) that none can dominate. The only two tribes evident on the wedding day were Arsenal or Manchester United supporters – the local Red Devils had lost to the visiting Gunners only an hour before – plus our small Australian tribe, nine strong. The first part of the wedding, known as Amatebeto, began with two of us – my first wife, Helen, and me – inspecting and tasting the food, and approving it as suitable for our precious only son. The roasted caterpillars were delicious, with the appearance of pecan nuts, and a nutty flavour not unlike witchetty grubs. I wickedly approved of them for my vegetarian son.

Barack Obama has promised to change the way America does things. If he is serious about this when it comes to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we can only hope that he will read Neve Gordon’s examination of Israel’s post-1967 rule of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The subject matter, and the occasionally choking academic writing, do not make for a pretty story. But the book might serve to temper the new president’s apparently effusive support for Israel. That country’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and its determined settlement-building programme, are an ongoing disaster for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Gordon, from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University at Beer-Sheva, observes that one of the striking aspects of the occupation has been the rising number of Palestinian fatalities. In the first two decades after 1967, a total of 650 people died (annual average, thirty-two). In the thirteen years from 1987 to the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the figure totalled 1491 (annual average, 106). From September 2000 to the end of 2006 it reached 4,046 (annual average, 674). The number of Israelis killed also increased dramatically: a total of 422 between 1987 and September 2000; 1,019 from then until the end of 2006.

I will always remember the first time I heard Kim Beazley Sr speak. It was at Kingswood College at the University of Western Australia, a year or two before the election of the Whitlam government. He spoke on the question of Aboriginal land rights, culture and spirituality. It was a spellbinding address which put the sword to the prevailing doctrine of assimilation. It wasn’t just the content of the speech which captured the interest of the student audience but the passion with which it was delivered. Like many there, my own thinking on the subject changed forever.

Eva Gandel and Marc Besen Married in Melbourne in 1950 and soon began collecting current art. After the closure of John Reed’s privately established but short-lived ‘Museum of Modern Art & Design of Australia’, they bought a few of its de-accessioned possessions, paintings by John Perceval and Sidney Nolan. In the 1970s they added works by recentlydeceased Sydney artists William Dobell, Ralph Balson, and Tony Tuckson. These were perceived ‘gaps’ in a collection of recent Australian art. Perhaps the systematic history of Australian art then profusely displayed in the private collection formed by their relative Joseph Brown, and first published in 1974 as Outlines of Australian Art, had inspired the Besens to be more systematic. Hitherto, they had mostly encountered local work by living artists.

Sonya Hartnett is one of the most various of good writers. In particular, she is good at creating atmosphere: a distinctive world for every story. As a consequence, every book she writes is a different style of book. Take some recent examples. The Ghost’s Child (2007), with its plot like a fable, reads like an old tale told in an outdated language of ‘sou’westers’ and ‘fays’. Its form, language and style are so consistent its oddity seems like part of its simplicity. In contrast, Surrender (2005), a horror story, has a style of calculated Gothic, playing narrative games to manufacture menace.

On the face of it, Hartnett’s latest book, Butterfly, is more conventional: a coming of age story set in the suburbs, written in a style of crowded realism. Ariella ‘Plum’ Coyle is nearly fourteen. Butterfly starts with Plum assessing herself in the mirror:

If her reflection is true then she has gone about in public like this – this thick black hair hugging her face like a sheenless scarf; these greasy cheeks with their evolving crop of scarlet lumps; this scurfy, hotly sunburned skin; these twin fleshy nubbins on her chest that are the worst thing of all …

The past is in Scotland

Dear Editor,

Christina Hill’s review of Peter Goldsworthy’s latest novel, Everything I Knew (November 2008), seems sure-footed in both its negative assessment of an ‘overwrought, undisciplined’ work and its appreciation of the novel’s compositional play, both intricate and subversive, with L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. It makes no mention, however, of the novel’s pointed intrigue with lyricism.

It is easy to believe, in the glad confident morning of the new presidency, that not being George W. Bush will be enough: that to restore America’s place in the world, Barack Obama need only avoid the mistakes and repudiate the misdeeds of his discredited predecessor. If so, his task will be easy, and this book may help. But what if something more is needed?

America and the World, produced at speed, is a book for the moment. Over seven days between late February and early April 2008, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius sat down with two revered elders of the foreign policy establishment, and started them talking about American foreign policy. The results – taped, transcribed and (it seems) only lightly edited – were sent off to the publisher. And here they are, between hard covers and selling fast.

Richard Walsh – former OZ co-editor, A&R, ACP and PBL director – has proven again that he has keen eye for what fixates Australians. To be remembered is of course an enduring human obsession, while the ability to send off (or send up) a friend or family member is more often an afterthought, a stepping into the breach.

Great Australian Eulogies features twenty-eight prominent Australians thrust into roles as diverse as Bob Carr’s commemoration of the Bali victims and Andrew Denton’s cheeky versification of the life of Don Chipp. Fans of Romulus, My Father (1998) are reunited with the eulogy which inspired Raimond Gaita’s best-seller. Cricket doyen Richie Benaud farewells Donald Bradman with gentle aplomb, noting that ‘the changes at the Cathedral End have been many and varied. He’s now got an ageing leg spinner, and I think the Don might have welcomed that.’ At the spiky end of the scale is Tom Hughes’s eulogy for John Gorton, which sensationally served as a platform for settling old political scores.

In his introduction, Walsh stresses the difference between a formal obituary and ‘a great eulogy [which], in my view, is a wonderfully eloquent little dramatic monologue that conjures up the very essence of someone’s spiritual core’. It is quite a task, but the eulogising process is also an opportunity for irreverence and playfulness. The collection also contains eulogies for those still living, a wonderful modern spin on the old gag of ‘a eulogy to die for’. Barry Humphries’ very nearly takes the cake in his eccentric speech for the eccentric Clyde Packer: ‘You left me to cultivate my virtues on my own, but took a true friend’s interest in my vices … Nobody could have corrupted me with such impeccable taste.’

As you read this anthology, be prepared for strange looks on public transport when you laugh out loud at a book with death on its title page but not in its contents.

This book follows Michael Brennan’s brilliant début collection, The Imageless World (2003). I do not make this connection lightly; Unanimous Night shares almost everything with its predecessor: themes, methods and tone of voice. They even share the same structure: groups of shorter poems (‘Letters Home’) are punctuated by some tightly organised extended sequences.

Three of these sequences are connected with works of art in one way or another. The first of them, ‘Sky Was Sky’, is overtly about loss, being centred around the suicide of the poet’s elder brother. But engaging a theme is not the same as being straightforward, and the first line of the opening poem of ‘Sky Was Sky’ – ‘I woke up but it was a dream’ – is decidedly equivocal. The following poems in this sequence are dream-images related to the absent brother. Though the style is abrupt and denotative, they do (like many other poems in this book) remind the reader of just how powerful a generator of images absence and loss are.

Despite the deadly title, this anthology of twenty-eight poems from the 2008 Newcastle Poetry Prize is replete with gems. Assembled from 423 entries by judges Jan Owen, Philip Salom, and Richard Tipping – effectively the anthology’s editors – it is a brilliant sampler that few anthologies can match for the legroom offered to the longer poem and poetry sequence.

David Malouf, one of the subjects interviewed by Margaret Throsby in Talking with Margaret Throsby, recounts his childhood experiences as an eavesdropper. He reveals that by listening in on conversations between his mother and her women friends he learnt about a world that was otherwise off-limits to him. For devotees of Mornings with Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM, the experience might sound familiar as they tune in to live conversations between the host and her distinguished guests; conversations which, although obviously public in that they are broadcast on national radio, frequently open a window onto the private world of the subject. Paul Keating, in Talking with Margaret Throsby, reveals that he would often prepare for cabinet sessions by listening to music (‘Start off slow, you know, and finish on something big’), conductor Jeffrey Tate discusses the ways in which he has coped with spina bifida, and writer and restaurateur Pauline Nguyen, who arrived in Australia as a ‘boat person’, talks about the difficulties of growing up in a household marked by fear and violence.

This April will signal the fifteenth anniversary of Throsby’s radio programme. Talking with Margaret Throsby, which consists of transcripts of nineteen interviews from the period 1997–2008, is thus a timely release. It presents Australian and international figures from the world of politics, literature, art, music, medicine, theatre, journalism, education and the outdoors.

In 1976 Carleton Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for his scientific research into Kuru, a degenerative brain disease that afflicted a small population of Fore people in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. This book is the story of the complexities of that scientific discovery as a social process. It is also the story of Gajdusek, a medical scientist whose intellectual energy and boundless egotism ensured that the fame and glory associated with this medical advance were his, unambiguously and singularly.

As a child, Gajdusek, born in New York in 1923, was inspired by stories of scientists as heroes, and entranced by tales of exploration and adventure in exotic places. As an adult, having graduated in medicine and embarked on a research career, he managed to sustain these enthusiasms as he engaged in a series of research projects that reflected his scientific eclecticism and his wanderlust.

The Great Arch has considerable if unlikely charm. It is a history of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a novel about real and imagined people living near its construction site. Hastrich brings to life (potentially dry) detail about huge steel plates, creeping cranes, rivets and cables. We see this mostly in the writings and photographs of her central character, an Anglican vicar who records the progress of the bridge-building in his parish paper and also writes a two-volume book about it. The Reverend Ralph Anderson Cage, rector at St Christopher’s at Lavender Bay (based on a real person, Frank Cash), is an endearingly hapless yet decent man who becomes obsessed with the unfolding engineering marvel that reshapes the population and topography of his once-thriving parish.

Other lives are woven through the main text about Ralph, his family, parishioners and neighbours, while the names and cause of death of the sixteen construction workers who died building the bridge are given in contemporary newspaper reports. The harm to the North Sydney community of Lavender Bay is charted as houses are demolished, one by one. Ironically, Ralph attempts to console the diminishing numbers of parishioners by lauding the magnificent technology and progress of the structure which he identifies with God’s great plan. Matching Ralph’s monomania is that of Lennie Gwideer, a character based on the remarkable nine-year-old Lennie Gwyther who rode his horse from Leongatha in Victoria to witness the grand opening in 1932. In the novel, the bridge becomes synonymous with the arrival of modernity in Sydney, traced from the early 1920s to 1967.

Hastrich has given us an absorbing novel and an entrancing social history of inner Sydney, the fading relevance of the church in people’s lives, and the sufferings caused by the Great Depression and World War II. After this, I will never again take the Sydney Harbour Bridge for granted.

Movie Of The Week. The MacNeil–Lehrer Newshour. Helen Vatsikopoulos. Andrea Stretton. Tales From a Suitcase. Pria Viswalingam. Italian Serie A Football. Annette Sun Wah. These are just a few examples of SBS programs and personalities that helped me – and no doubt many others – negotiate the fetid swamp that was Australian television in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the swamp is a lot bigger and the stench even worse, but does SBS still provide an effective alternative?

The Special Broadcasting Service began in January 1978 as a central controlling body for ethnic radio. The Fraser government soon expanded the service to include television, the first transmission of Channel 0/28 airing in Sydney and Melbourne on 24 October 1980. The SBS Story considers the entire period from the first political push toward multiculturalism by Whitlam minister Al Grassby, to recent controversies surrounding the organisation’s charter and claimed deviations from it by management.

Ashley Sievwright’s The Shallow End, an often entertaining début, casts a wry gaze over a steamy Melbourne summer. Narrated by an unnamed observer, the novel attempts to capture an authentically idiosyncratic gay male voice while traversing a myriad of issues, such as heartbreak, sex, media sensationalism, love, cruising and happiness. Both witty and easy to read, the novel, though largely superficial, is filled with moments of droll sagacity.

Having fled the quagmire of a failed relationship in Barcelona, The Shallow End’s nameless protagonist forlornly returns to Melbourne and begins to wallow the summer away at the Prahran Pool. While filling his hours sunbathing, and enjoying the beautiful gay cohort on display, he becomes intrigued by the enigmatic disappearance of a fellow swimmer, Matt Gray. Increasingly animated by the ensuing media fracas surrounding the questionable particulars of Gray’s personal life, the protagonist launches his own conjecture-driven investigation of the case. As the narrative meanders haphazardly toward the denouement, and as the narrator’s new ‘sugar-pill sex’ lover (who, incidentally, happens to be another swimmer picked up at the Prahran Pool) appears to be linked to the disappearance, the greater mystery – just what went down in Spain – intensifies.

The evocative prose and cynical humour are Sievwright’s strengths; the conjuring of the pool in summer, complete with its eccentric regulars, is testament to this. Similarly, the dry commentary on media hype, and the playful representation of the erotically charged dance of gazes involved in the politics of a hook-up, are impressively rendered. The narrative trajectory, however, is ultimately dissatisfying. The issues at heart of the story – love, loss and the emergence from emotional darkness – frequently take the backseat. Though promising to lead us into deeper water, The Shallow End remains, disappointingly, where its title suggests.

If the history of ornithology seems esoteric, of interest only to specialists, this is the book to open your eyes. Tim Birkhead is an eminent field ornithologist and a gifted and passionate science communicator. Each of these elements shines from this book, a wonderful distillation of the vast ornithological literature that has accumulated over the past four centuries. Effectively a history of natural history, it is a delight to read.

Anyone interested in the natural world cannot help but notice birds. They are common, diverse, adaptable, colourful, noisy and mostly diurnal. Their ability to fly has been a source of wonder and envy for all humanity. These characteristics combine to make birds relatively easy to observe, identify and study. Consequently, more is known about the biology and ecology of birds than any other group of animals, and many of the major breakthroughs in biological understanding have come from the study of birds.

Travellers’ tales have long starred curious misfits eager to sample different ways of life in faraway places. In On the Road (1957), Jack Kerouac writes of fleeing his cultured, sedentary New York milieu for the company of the insatiable ‘Dean Moriaty’, who, rather than analysing the world from the sidelines, ‘just raced in society, eager for bread and love’. Dharma Bums, published a year later, presaged the birth of the backpacker and predicted ‘a great rucksack revolution’ of young people ‘refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway’. Fellow Beat icon William S. Burroughs observed of his friend’s influence: ‘Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.’ Adelaide girl Elsie O’Reilly, the hippy heroine of Lemniscate, belongs to the Woodstock generation and subconsciously follows in the footsteps of Kerouac and his Beat compatriots. She marches against the Vietnam War in Australia and dances in the streets of London when Gough Whitlam is elected prime minister. She is hungry to experience life beyond the staid constructs of her Catholic upbringing. When we meet her, she is three years into her world trip, traversing Asia on her meandering way home.

The familiar triumvirate of globalisation, advanced technology and consumerism has altered feminist, activist and subcultural practices so dramatically that their originators have trouble recognising them, and academics are racing to keep up. Next Wave Cultures acknowledges and embraces these upheavals in women’s social and political action. Anita Harris has selected a motley group of eleven essays that cover a diverse range of lifestyles, identities, communities and activities.

Slightly dated topics are revitalised in discussions of international zine networks, culture jamming, female surfers, adolescent sexuality, girls’ street culture, hip-hop ‘gangstressism’ and Riot Grrl, while the cutting edge is navigated by essays on Internet ‘cam girls’, an empowered group of disabled film-makers, and Reflections, a magazine run by young Muslim women. The volume concludes with two essays, one co-authored by Harris, which provide a general view of recent forms of young women’s activism in Australia and the United Kingdom.

With their vast differences in tone, writing style and content, the leap between essays can be daunting; however, a blanket style would have stifled this collection. The downside to Harris’s approach is that not all of the essays are of the same standard or purpose. Academic arguments, cluttered with jargon, are mingled with promotions of organisations, ideas and publications. Too often, problematic elements, such as the horrors some women have experienced under Sharia law, are glossed over or ignored.

Also puzzling is Harris’s relatively narrow focus on the Internet. Of course, it would be impossible for anyone fully to chart the vibrant chaos of today’s female-dominated endeavours. To her credit, Harris’s collection has a broad and intriguing scope, and is enjoyable and thought-provoking, even at its most uneven and biased.

Valentine Alexa Leeper: it’s a name to conjure with. The daughter of the first warden of the University of Melbourne’s Trinity College, Alexander Leeper, she was christened ‘Valentine’ because she was born on 14 February. No name could have been less appropriate: she was to prove a committed spinster. She was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which was that her life spanned an entire century. Born in 1900, she survived into the twenty-first century. Although her life experience might have appeared narrow and confined (she never travelled abroad, for example) Valentine had the advantage of growing up in a university environment and was possessed of a formidable intellect; her interests were wide and she was active in many organisations, ranging from the League of Nations Union to the Victorian Aboriginal Group.

Faced with the publication of her first novel, the narrator of Stepping Out has a terrifying thought. ‘I was about to be unmasked,’ she realises. ‘End of my double life. Everyone was about to dip into my world and find out what was really cooking there ... I felt like I’d placed a bomb and was waiting, under cover, for it to explode.’

In this unabashedly autobiographical novel, Catherine Rey overcomes this feeling and writes with the unflinching bluntness of a veteran author. Part manifesto, part celebration of survival, part cautionary tale, Stepping Out describes the narrator’s life from the ages of eighteen to fifty. It recounts her battles with her family, her determination to write, and her journey from 1970s France to contemporary Australia.

It used to be said in decades gone by that overseas acting luminaries only came to Australia when their stars were in decline. This was never true in the case of Sybil Thorndike, who was critically acclaimed here, and widely admired as a person. She was not one of those who was past her prime – or, like some, never had one. She remained in her prime until she died in 1976. It is indeed hard to imagine her contemplating any other approach.

Her acting career spanned sixty-five years, from 1904, when she made her professional stage début, until, aged eighty-eight, she appeared in The Great Inimitable Mr Dickens on television. Her career occupies seven columns in Who’s Who in the Theatre (1972), and that is mostly taken up with her stage roles, the diversity of which is astonishing. She played the title roles in Shaw’s Saint Joan and Candida, was an unforgettable Medea, embraced Grand Guignol (playing ‘a sixteen-year-old slut’ when she was nearly forty), played innumerable roles in Shakespeare and Chekhov, starred twice for N.C. Hunter, archetypal purveyor of the well-made play, in Waters of the Moon and A Day by the Sea … but there is no use going on with such a list. It would take the whole space available to me here. It is enough to say that she commanded the stage, not just as the grandest of grandes dames but as an actress who brought vigour and rigour to whatever she did. Edith Evans may have been subtler and Peggy Ashcroft more cerebrally impressive, but no one else was so ablaze with humanity – the humanity she found in every role she played.

One of the first books I read about news and politics was a lively British volume edited by Richard Boston, called The Press We Deserve (1970). In it, he quoted a recent speech by the Duke of Edinburgh reciting all the standard clichés about the role a free press played in sustaining democracy. On the contrary, Boston argued, a newspaper such as the News of the World is about as helpful to democracy as an outbreak of typhoid. It may, he said, be the price of democracy, but that was a rather different proposition.

This disjunction – between the democratic indispensability of the news media and their sometimes irresponsible behaviour, or, more often, their pedestrian mediocrity – is one that analysts of the media frequently have to wrestle with. Must we celebrate every example of sensationalism and inaccuracy, every outpouring of prejudice, as enhancing democracy? On the other hand, a puritanical judgementalness can quickly degenerate into censorship. Moreover the complaints of media critics are as fallible and unreasonable as are the media themselves.

What might pique the interest of even the most casual observer, consumer or critic of country music, popular culture or celebrity, or all three, is the title of Jeff Apter’s ‘unauthorised’ biography, Fortunate Son: The Unlikely Rise of Keith Urban. The commercially catchy title parallels and mimics the musical style of its famous subject, while also striking an odd, even humorous note in its backhanded recognition of ‘our Keith’s’ American success. That Apter also markets his biography as ‘unauthorised’ provides another selling point. Knowing that the book is not commissioned by Urban suggests that it may deliver an edgy ‘tell all’ account of Nicole Kidman’s husband. One might be forgiven for thinking that such a work will take risks, since it is under no obligation to provide a flattering portrayal of its subject. It doesn’t. In fact, its very lack of risk is clear even without undertaking a close reading.

‘I could give ’em / enough social comment to fill a car park’ proffers the narrator in ‘Busking’, halfway through Tim Thorne’s I Con. In many ways, this book delivers on that promise. Thorne’s targets include war, colonisation, inequality, political deception, capitalism and celebrity. One moment he juxtaposes Dannii Minogue’s career with descriptions of police brutality; the next he bowls a bouncer at former Australian cricket captain Kim Hughes for touring South Africa during the apartheid era.

Thorne has published twelve books of poetry over four decades, founded and directed the Tasmanian Poetry Festival for seventeen years, and read his work throughout Australia. Yet many on the mainland might still be unfamiliar with his poetry. This New and Selected Poems presents Thorne’s work in roughly chronological order and brings the uninitiated up to speed.

‘I never thought Australia needed culture of any kind,’ drawls Barry Humphries in Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley’s recent documentary on Australian ‘trash’ cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Perverse aesthete that he is, Humphries cannot resist the idea that lack of refinement might be a sign of vitality: ‘Culture is yoghurt, isn’t it, or mould? It grows on decaying things.’

Unlike Humphries, the media scholar Stuart Cunningham seems to have kept his faith both in the value of culture for Australia and in the positive impact that governments and intellectuals might make on the nation’s cultural health. What has shifted over the years is his stated rationale for this position; a sense of his evolution can be gleaned from his new collection, In the Vernacular, which assembles essays first published between 1985 and 2006, along with new introductory material.

At the time that I was asked to review Rosemary Lancaster’s Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France, 1880–1945, I was reading American writer Helen Barolini’s Their Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy (2006). The books are similar: five of Lancaster’s six chapters are devoted to individual women whose lives and experience, like those in Barolini, cover the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth. Both books are very much of the transnational moment, with its preoccupations with movement, connections and experience across borders, and premises that the identities of individuals and nations are formed abroad in contact and collision with others, as well as at home. The number of studies of overseas lives continues to grow but is surpassed by transcultural life writing, including Australian, in what has been described as ‘villa/ge’ books, travel writing that is about the destination not the voyaging, about living abroad rather than touring, about subject in situ rather than ‘situ’.

Just as God created the earth in seven days, Simmone Howell’s Everything Beautiful rebuilds the life of sixteen-year-old Riley Rose in a week spent at a Christian summer camp.

Two years after the death of her mother, Lilith (an allusion to Adam’s first wife), atheist Riley has become the quintessential bad girl – smoking, drinking and getting arrested. On the advice of her father’s new girlfriend, Riley is sentenced to a seven-day stint at the Spirit Ranch holiday camp, with nothing but a new hairstyle, a copy of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and, courtesy of her best friend, a bus ticket home.

While the children’s picture book is a relatively recent literary phenomenon, most picture book authors still tap into the strong traditions of oral storytelling. Multi-award winning author Mem Fox is particularly good at this. Fox’s picture book texts are firmly grounded in the three R’s – the traditional rhythms, rhymes and repetitions found in children’s songs and verses throughout the ages. This, combined with Judy Horacek’s inspired illustrations, was what made Where is the Green Sheep? (2004) such a success.

Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes (Viking, $24.95 hb, 40 pp, 9780670072392), illustrated by renowned picture book artist Helen Oxenbury, is one of Fox’s best yet. Fox’s economical text is cleverly structured to engage young children in an entertaining and interactive language experience. At the same time, it gently teaches them that every child, no matter what colour, creed or country of origin, shares the same basic things – ten little fingers, ten little toes and someone who loves them. The rhyming text rolls off the tongue, and the refrain is sure to have children joining in enthusiastically. Fox says that the text, written in one sitting on an international flight, was inspired by the ‘simply irresistible’ chubby fingers of babies, and that she wanted to emphasise people’s similarities rather than their differences.