In David Malouf’s second and perhaps most celebrated novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), of which this new novella is so reminiscent, the Roman poet Ovid is exiled to a primitive village named Tomis. Ovid, ‘called Naso because of the nose’, has been banished due to his unspoken affronts. In Tomis, Ovid, doomed and apart, senses that he must acquire in simplicity a new kind of wisdom:

Must it all be like this from now on? Will I have to learn everything all over again like a child? Discovering the world as a small child does, through the senses … I have smelled my way to the very edge of things, where Nothing begins. That’s where a Nose gets you … I am relegated to the region of silence.

Ever since then, Malouf’s characters, mostly men, often young, have been drawn to ‘the very edge of things’. Not for him the promiscuous alliances or metropolitan mires of an Iris Murdoch or Philip Roth or Alan Hollinghurst. So often, paired or alone, his characters slip away from the centre, ‘relegated to the region of silence’. The effect, in Malouf’s superb prose, is usually transformative. To paraphrase Ovid, these exiles will be separated from themselves and yet be alive.

In Ransom – like An Imaginary Life a kind of extended prose poem – Malouf draws on the closing books of The Iliad, the epic poem in 15,693 lines of hexameter verse, so named by Herodotus. The Trojan War, of something like 1200 BCE, is fast unravelling. In this state of exhaustion and petulant stasis, Achilles – breaker of men, the raging son of Peleus – recalls his first glimpse of Patroclus when they were boys. Homer tells us little of this famous pact; Malouf, likewise succinct, describes the instant attraction. Achilles, ‘spellbound’, meets Patroclus’s gaze. ‘The blow, connects, bone on bone. And the boy, his clear eyes still fixed on Achilles, takes it … They were mated. But darkly, flesh to ghost.’

After this moody, suggestive prelude, war resumes. Patroclus, tormented by Greek disunity and by Achilles’ quarrel with the generals, borrows his helmet and shield and is quickly dispatched by Hector, with none of the teeming slaughterdom of Book 16 of The Iliad. Achilles, enraged and devastated by his loss, avenges his friend and lashes Hector’s handsome corpse to his chariot, dragging his head through the dust, in prose of an eloquence and suppleness that we might have thought extinct:

Faster and faster he drove, up and down the walls of Troy, his hair loose and flying, gouts of sweat flung from his brow, as Hector’s corpse, raw now from head to foot and caked with dust, bounded and tumbled, and Priam, Hector’s father, and his mother Hecuba … and all the common people of Troy, who had flocked to every vantage point on the walls, looked on.

Priam, always terrified of Achilles, ‘that hard, headlong man’ (Robert Fagles), resolves to act, prompted by Iris, Zeus’s messenger. After a vigil of eleven days – ‘like a man under instruction from his daemon or following the contours of a dream’ – Priam decides to extricate his son’s body from Achilles’ court before it can be subjected to more crazed defilements. He will bear the princely ransom that the dying Hector, terrified of being fed to the dogs, implored Achilles to accept (in a passage from Homer not treated by Malouf). Rather like Malouf’s Ovid, ‘[Priam] will get used to the unaccustomed. It is what he is after.’

First, though, Priam must convince his grieving family and court – and Hecuba, mother of nineteen of his fifty sons, many of them killed by the Greeks. His wife remains scornful. In her stern, cheerless authority, she reminds us of Fricka in the great scene with Wotan in Die Walküre. Intransigent, she lectures Priam about his kingly duties and his likely fate at Achilles’ hands. Even in a short book, this scene, with its set speeches, feels overlong, like certain passages of Wagner. Priam broods on the possibilities of ‘chance’ in a world that is ruthlessly deterministic.

As Priam seeks to reassure Hecuba, the general idiom becomes decidedly un-Homeric, too modern to convince:

I feel a kind of freedom … It’s a feeling I like, it appeals to me. And perhaps, because it is unexpected, it may appeal to [Achilles] too: the chance to break free of the obligation of being always the hero, as I am expected always to be the king. To take on the lighter bond of being simply a man. Perhaps that is the real gift I have to bring him. Perhaps that is the ransom.

Eventually, Priam departs and the novella revives. Priam – ‘no staff in his hand, no amulet or armband’ – eschews lordly trappings and insists on travelling in a humble mule-cart. In movement, flux – the centrifugal quest – there is a kind of consolation or self-overcoming. Here we recall Charlie Dowd, the young conscript in ‘War Baby’, one of the stories collected in Every Move You Make (2006): ‘Walking was another form of thinking – or maybe unthinking – in which the body took over, went its own way and the mind went with it.’

Priam’s companion is not the ‘seasoned Idaeus’ of Homer but a stocky carter who picks up work at the market. Somax, an endearing creation of Malouf’s, fond and attentive as Lear’s Clown, humours his beloved mules and protects the desolate king. Somax, spinner of tales, tells Priam about his life. He has lost five children of his own; they have things in common. He shares his griddlecakes with the king and rhapsodises about their creation, how such homely lightness is achieved. Priam, until now almost professionally oblivious to the human and the particular, is entranced by the story of the buttermilk and by Somax’s account of his surviving family. Life, finally, simplifies and humanises him. There is something Prospero-like about his gentle unravelling and relinquishment. He begins to recognise another human being, just as Ovid does in An Imaginary Life when he gains the closest friend he ever had: ‘How strange that I have had to leave my own people to find him. He has taught me to weave a net, and I begin to be good at it.’

On they go, fading king and chatty carter, protected by Hermes, sent by Zeus to guard them (‘escorting men is your greatest joy’: Fagles). Their arrival at the gates of Achilles’ lodge prompts a coup de théâtre, conceived by Malouf. The following scenes between Priam and Hector’s killer are full of dread, caution, and stratagems, but eventually the two leaders reach accord. Achilles, too, with mortal dawnings of his own, is capable of the authentic Maloufian epiphany and transformation:

He knows what this sudden suspension of his hard, manly qualities denotes … This melting in him of will, of self … The particles of which they are composed, within the solid forms, tumble and swarm. As if flow not fixity were their nature. The world swims, and for as long as the mood lasts he too is afloat.         

Priam and Achilles attain a kind of intimacy. Once again, Malouf’s characters are purified by contemplation and the company of other men. They part almost tenderly, respectfully. ‘Call on me, Priam,’ says Achilles. The old man, however, cannot resist a premonitory final word. Back he goes to Troy with his son’s corpse, lighter now in many ways. ‘Look, he wants to shout, I am still here, but the I is different … a state of exultant wellbeing in which he too is divinely led as by music.’

The prose is consistently fine. Malouf is incapable of an ugly sentence. The style is so sure, so unostentatious, that we can overlook how good it is, how time and again it does his bidding with quiet aplomb. One long bravura sentence on page forty-five is so dramatic and seamless that the reader hardly notices that it runs to seventeen lines – long for Malouf, who is a master of the succinct and the elliptical.

Malouf states in the afterword that his primary interest in this book is in storytelling per se – ‘why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling’ – but this is storytelling of a swooniness that is very different from the Homeric kind. At times the gulf between Priam’s elegiac pilgrimage and Homer’s existential bloodbaths induces a kind of impatience for the stark, the sinewy, the inflamed, the possessed. Trademark phrases in Ransom such as this of Achilles – ‘His soul not yet settled in him’ – or the notion of his killing Hector ‘man to man, but impersonally’ seem gauzed and gritless, so different from Thoreau’s sense of the epic poet (‘Homer was a greater hero than Ajax or Achilles’) or from Simone Weil’s famous insight: ‘The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force as man’s instrument, force as man’s master, force before which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul, in this poem, is shown always in its relation to force ...’

At least one critic has acclaimed Ransom as a late masterpiece. Notwithstanding the undoubted pleasures of the prose, other readers may return with something like awe to the incomparable original, with its deific vaults, its terrors – and the astonishing gore.

What’s the use,’ asks Alice before wandering away from her uncommunicative sister, ‘of a book without pictures or conversations?’ Grown-up readers can probably manage without the former, but it is unusual to find a novel with as little dialogue in it as Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion, or one that so deliberately ignores the common injunction ‘Show, don’t tell.’

Yet Goldsmith has several books to her credit, including The Prosperous Thief, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2002, and for several years taught creative writing at Deakin University. Presumably she knows what she is doing. In point of fact, not only does this flouting of conventional rules come over as quite refreshing, it is in any case justified by the demands of the narrative.

For Gabrielle Carey, the sight of her mother’s bare feet, soles facing, was almost unbearable. Naked and defenceless, she had never seen them from that angle before. Other parts of a loved one’s anatomy could produce such a feeling – the nape of a beloved neck or an innocent elbow – but on this occasion it was the old feet projecting from the elderly and suddenly compromised body, strapped to a trolley, awaiting a CT scan. The daughter ‘didn’t quite know what to do’, which turns out to be a revealing remark. She wonders if she should stroke her arm or not, but before offering any such support she is asked to leave the cubicle.

Joan Carey, née Ferguson, who believed she was perfectly fine, was to have her brain scanned. She considered the entire procedure a waste of time and money. ‘A wicked waste’ she called it, a phrase familiar from the author’s Sydney childhood. Joan’s behaviour and reactions, always a combination of good manners and thrift, had recently changed noticeably. In a life filled with intelligent good works and service to others, suddenly she seemed bewildered, puzzled and doddery. Forgetful, she had started to miss appointments, lose things and appear vague and distracted. Such manifestations of absent-mindedness are familiar to many with elderly parents; others are well aware of these problems through the media. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are facts of modern life.

In 1950 a friend presented the young Welsh poet T.H. Jones with a hand-made, leather-bound octavo notebook, the ‘Black Book’ into which he subsequently copied every completed poem he wished to preserve until shortly before his untimely death in 1965 at the age of forty-three. The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (1977) included a brief selection of unpublished poems from this notebook, as well as the poems from Jones’s four published volumes. Now, some thirty years later, we have a collection of all the poems from the notebook, as well as those from earlier preserved manuscripts, some only recently located. It also includes a handful of poems completed between the filling of the Black Book in 1964 and the poet’s death, and some additional poems that the poet considered ‘too “occasional” for preservation’, thus making it the first complete gathering of his large and impressive poetic oeuvre. The editors include a biographical introduction and extensive notes dating the poems, identifying first publications, and explaining literary and personal references.

Australia’s major galleries, with the odd exception, have generally conducted their exhibition programs to show that fanfare for blockbusters is reserved for exhibitions that come from somewhere other than Australia. The die was cast long ago. In the past thirty years, temporary exhibitions have increasingly consumed the lives of public galleries – and blockbusters represent the embodiment of this phenomenon.

These were born out of serious curatorial endeavour, but also include brilliant quirks of serendipity. One good trait is excellent relations with museums with an eye for loan fees and closing for renovations; and there’s the occasional shameless act of cultural profiteering. One of my favourite cartoons appeared in the New Yorker years ago: a sketchy view of the Metropolitan Museum, with a large banner stretched between the entry columns: Masterpieces from the Golden Age of Tax Deductible Contributions. Cynical? Sure – but it says a lot about the complexity of exhibitions. Some of the best big shows have come from ideas built from the strengths of the institutions themselves – both the collections and their staff. In recent years, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has done this better than most, especially with Asian Art. Goddess Divine Energy (AGNSW, 2007) was the most intelligent historical exhibition in Australia in recent years.

Towards the close of the second section of The Red Highway, Nicolas Rothwell is driving across the Kimberley Plateau towards Wyndham with a hitchhiker, an Aboriginal girl. When she asks why he has come back, he tells her that while he was a reporter in the Middle East he heard stories about places in the Kimberley that reminded him of people he knew there and of how much he missed the country. He tells her that ‘people who come to northern Australia come here because they’re lost, or searching, or on the edge of life, and silence, and they’re chasing after some kind of pattern, some redemption they think might be lurking, on the line of the horizon, out in the faint, receding perspectives of the bush’. He turns on the radio and picks up a station based in Kununurra. The announcer is chatting about strongyloids, a parasitic worm which causes heart and kidney problems in outback communities. ‘“I’ve got that,” said Cherandra proudly.’

Over the last two decades, Ross Gibson has earned an outstanding reputation for ground-breaking investigations into cultural memory, image and place, and for his strikingly innovative films and installations, his curatorial work on the Photographic Collection of the Sydney Justice & Police Museum, his foundational directorship of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and, of course, his highly imaginative non-fictional writing. With its eponymous allusions to William Empson and to Jonathan Raban, his Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) announced its own haunting by earlier explorations of the pastoral and of the irreducible ambiguities in history’s traces.

It doesn’t take much to realise that John Hartley admires the work of Richard Hoggart, the famous English literary critic and founder of the field of Cultural Studies. The titles of several of his books are tributes to Hoggart, including this one. As Hartley explains on the first page, The Uses of Literacy (1957) set the agenda for educational and disciplinary reform in schools and universities. Hoggart’s strong views on the abuse of literacy, especially in the entertainment media, found much public support. This interest in literacy lay in what ordinary people did with it as part of everyday culture rather than as an instrumental skill for business, civic or religious purposes.

If you felt there was a touch of hubris in Baz Luhrmann’s naming his movie Australia, you may think the opening sentence of Christopher Bigsby’s biography of Arthur Miller even more startling in its pretensions: ‘This is the story of a writer, but it is also the story of America.’ Not, observe, ‘a story’, but ‘the story’. This grandiose proposition helps to account for nearly 700 dense, uncompromising pages – and they only take in the first half of Miller’s long life (1915–2005).

The big facts of Miller’s life are dealt with in such exhaustive detail that one feels it will be a long time before another biography will be needed. The Jewish background, the left-wing sympathies, the emerging writer, the marriage with Marilyn Monroe: these are the towering ‘facts’ which help us to keep our bearings in the sometimes cluttered landscape of the book. Bigsby habitually relates the writing to the life, in this matter echoing Miller himself, who claimed that his plays constituted ‘a biography of his awareness of the world’. This then is a book that makes large claims: ‘he did, indeed, change the world and continues to do so.’ Intrepidity on this scale compels both admiration and wariness.

When Petrus Borel led Victor Hugo’s private ‘claque’ into the theatre of the Comédie-Française in 1830 for the opening performance of Hugo’s play Hernani, he and the others of the Romantic ‘push’ fully intended their actions to precipitate the death of classicism in French theatre. They succeeded. Had Peter Porter been in the audience, one wonders where he would have positioned himself between the Romantic shock troops (in part driven by the compulsions of the Petit Cénacle) and the classicist critics who panned the play and all it stood for in the press the next day. The performance and the attendant conflicts became known as ‘La Bataille D’Hernani’.

Porter’s sympathies and empathies would doubtless have been divided, though he would certainly have been on the side of the republicans rather than the royalists. We can’t but suspect that the failure of classical values to hold the day might have disappointed him. But Porter’s classicism is never orthodox. His inflections of classical tradition through a European inheritance are as much about the journey as they are about a status quo of aesthetics. He is more likely to satirise all involved and step off into a critical space that draws influence from both sides of the equation. Porter can admire Thomas Hardy as much as he admires Horace – the gap is not as large as some might like to think.

Porter operates out of an independent position that comes from the divided loyalties of The Group (and the Movement) in London during the 1950s, and his restless dialogue – physical and psychological – between states of habitation in Australia and his home of almost sixty years, London. He talks between spaces, between the European and the antipodean. His explorations of belonging are tied up in issues of subjectivity, in a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious, and in what can be drawn to the surface. The binary between the Athenian of Porter and the Boeotian of Les Murray was a false dichotomy in so many ways – one that ‘had legs’ (impelled by both Murray and Porter themselves) and left them both in an opposition that is superficial and challengeable.

A popular myth holds that all librarians are inspired by a love of books. As with all such stereotypes, it doesn’t take long working in the profession to realise that it is only partly true, only slightly more so than the cardigan, bun and glasses with which we are usually endowed in the popular imagination. Librarians, in fact, whatever their initial sentiments about books, commonly become blasé about the volumes they are responsible for and can be pitiless in weeding out the less attractive, useful and popular books from their collections. David Pearson’s new book sets out to make librarians and others who have books in their care think again about their value as cultural artefacts and pieces of historical evidence, especially at this moment in history when they are beginning to lose their primary role as repositories of the world’s knowledge.

Pearson is a librarian and a scholar of book history, a combination which is rarer than might be imagined. What is especially unusual is that he is a library manager – Director of the University of London Research Library Services. Such people these days are rarely able to pursue a second career in research, even if they hold senior positions. The scholar librarian usually sits somewhat lower down the hierarchy. However, Pearson is the author of three excellent works on book history: Provenance Research in Book History (1994), English Bookbinding Styles 1450–1800 (2005), and now Books as History: The Importance of Books beyond Their Texts.

A book with a title such as this one necessarily invites a question: is it going to be a theological work using examples from the stated body of fiction, or an exercise in literary criticism confined mainly to religious themes, just as other critics might focus their discussion on political or psychological issues? Most authors would of course protest against this crude ‘either/or’ proposition and assert that the strictly literary aspects of a novel, as distinct perhaps from non-fiction, are inseparable from any intellectual issues it might raise. Neither approach should play Christ to the other’s St Christopher.

However, when the author in question is the Archbishop of Canterbury and sometime Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, one may be justified in expecting his interest in Dostoevsky to stem from a desire to vindicate or polemicise the novelist’s theological position. Rowan Williams certainly marvels at Dostoevsky’s stance in regard to matters of faith, but the subtlety of his insights and his meticulously text-based arguments (that is, Dostoevsky’s texts, not the church’s) reach a level beyond categorisation. Williams is passionately interested in this writer precisely because of Dostoevsky’s differences from, rather than conformity to, either conventional theology or conventional novel writing.

‘The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore,’ says Max Weber, ‘wherever rational empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.’ Darwinism, or so one version of the history of modern culture goes, is the culmination of the process of disenchantment, the last step in the transformation of the world into a causal mechanism.

Where the great minds of early modern science concur in thinking that scientific study of the creation acquaints human beings better with the majesty of the creator, Darwin’s theory of natural selection seems to dispose of the creator without further ado. The famous core of it is the hypothesis that undirected biological change acts as a creative force, generating new species and ensuring that those best adapted to their environments have the greatest reproductive success. As plain as it sounds, the implications are startling: species need no longer be thought of as immutable creations of divinity; man himself no longer appears minted in the image of God; the earth, as a whole, acquires a distinctively modern natural history that dispenses with all notion of divine provision for human needs and aspirations. ‘It is like confessing to murder,’ Darwin wrote in an 1844 letter to Joseph Dalton, as the new theory put him on an unavoidable collision course with the proponents of a one-off biblical creation.

The title of this memoir and the cover picture, showing a pretty girl with brown skin and hair and dark eyes walking along an urban street hand-in-hand with a neatly dressed white woman, captures the theme of uncertain identity. The story begins in mid-twentieth-century Australia, when, under the government’s assimilation policy, children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were still being removed from their families. Lorraine McGee-Sippel was not stolen from her family by the authorities, but was surrendered for adoption by her eighteen-year-old mother.

As Lorraine grows up, her desire to find her natural mother and discover her origins (which she mistakenly believes, until her late thirties, to be a mix of white Australian and black American) becomes all-consuming. This desire is obstructed by the lie that her adoptive parents were told by social workers and that is repeated to Lorraine at the moment of crisis that opens the story. The scene should have been a joyful one: the announcement of Lorraine’s engagement. Instead, her adoptive father says:

As Israel began its assault on Gaza last year, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, launched the offensive by declaring: ‘There is a time for calm and a time for fighting.’ His declaration alluded to Ecclesiastes, but overturned the order of the verse. Not so long ago, however, in an era that has since been largely misrepresented by its detractors, there was a time for peace; a time when, at a deal-signing ceremony between Israel and the Palestinians in Washington in 1993, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, used the same phrase from Ecclesiastes but was able to leave it intact.

History, however, tends to be skewed towards reckoning the past, as it happened: it sometimes fails to take account of events that almost happened, but did not. In the past eight years, it has often been overlooked – or drowned out by the shrill cycles of war and elections – that diplomatic efforts as late as 2000 came within small and not impassable sticking points of reaching permanent peace deals between Israel and the Palestinians and Syria. But this hindsight bias has tended to stamp final outcomes with an air of inevitability that they do not deserve, and has added to the gloom that pervades present approaches to peacemaking in the Middle East. As Martin Indyk records in a small footnote in these memoirs of a decade of US-sponsored peace-making, the Bush administration demonstrated its shift in policy from its predecessor by ending public references to a Middle East peace process: it was just ‘the Middle East’.

The Bible is not a book. Its title comes from the Greek biblia, books; it is a collection, or library. That the Bible has become a single book, or even the book for some, is a remarkable and sometimes problematic accident, and the premise for this engaging tour through one part of its history.

Lori Anne Ferrell’s The Bible and the People is not a history of the Bible or even, as its title might suggest, of the popular uses and understandings of Jewish or Christian scriptures. It is the story of ‘a Bible’, the English Bible, and ‘a people’, ultimately the people of the United States. Even though more than half of the book deals with Bibles older than the American colonies, the narrative thread that binds its discussions of particular books and readers comes from an interest in what happens to the Bible when it crosses the Atlantic.

More specifically, the book arises from an exhibition curated by the author from the holdings of the Huntington Library. The politics of this collection are not addressed, which is a pity. The presence in San Marino, California, of items including the remarkable Gundulf Bible and a Gutenberg Bible bespeaks more than piety. However, the fact that Ferrell’s discussion is grounded in particular books, rather than just the idea of one, is a strength.

Recently I engaged in an act of bad faith as a teacher. I set my second-year Shakespeare students a ‘research essay’ as a final piece of assessment, and insisted that they engage with primary scholarship – hardcover monographs and scholarly articles – if they wanted to do well. The problem is that industrial-strength literary criticism is almost unintelligible to undergraduates, and that is not entirely their fault. I knew this, but went ahead and set a criterion I knew would benefit only the tiny minority who might go on to a higher degree. The bulk of my students, who will be teaching adolescent South Australians Romeo + Juliet for decades to come, may never get around to thanking me.

My unease is confirmed by reading Penny Gay’s excellent new Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies. According to the rules I set for the essay, this book is a textbook, a work of synthesis rather than of serious academic literary criticism. This is true, but not for good reasons. The latest work of new historicism tends to read like a rebarbative coded message to the inmates of other North American graduate schools, whereas Gay’s book strikes me as a balanced voice of experience and wisdom. Gay’s is a book you might read without being compelled to, for the pleasure of learning more about plays that continue to work on the stage and on the page. It is the sort of book that would have helped my students. Serious academic criticism, by contrast, seems to exist exclusively for people who want to publish more serious academic criticism.

The Best Australian Political Writing 2009 is a collection of articles about the political climate in Australia over the course of twelve months. In 411 pages, a range of prominent Australian writers analyse the events that made headlines in this country during what editor Eric Beecher describes as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime-year’.

The year in question – 2008 – began with the new Labor prime minister’s formal apology to members of the Stolen Generations and their descendants. This parliamentary apology was regarded by numerous commentators as a momentous occasion and a shift from the conservative and controversial race politics of the Howard government. By the end of 2008, Australia found itself in the grip of the ‘global financial crisis’. As Beecher wryly observes, ‘everyone became an economics expert’, suggesting different sources of blame for this ‘crisis’ and different ways of combating it. Throughout the year, a number of other issues appeared on this country’s political landscape, including climate change and the debate surrounding Bill Henson’s photographs of naked adolescents.

It is exhilarating and always illuminating to return to Henry Lawson. His is a body of work – slim and fragile though it may be – with which many would confidently claim to be particularly familiar. ‘The Drover’s Wife’, ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, ‘The Loaded Dog’ and many others are a part of our literary and cultural reference. Yet Lawson’s fiction is so deceptive, seemingly intuitive and ‘natural’, that it is easy to forget just how artful and crafted it is. This is one reason why the Mitchell sketches, for example, held together by a few strokes and much implication, are always potent reminders of how brilliantly and deftly Lawson managed his fiction, how spare, tremulous and scarcely visible are the structural props of his narrative, and how he merged his own experiences into a prose that powerfully transcends its autobiographical provenance. These are some of the reasons why the reissue of a collection like John Barnes’s influential and authoritative take on Lawson is welcome and timely. The addition of John Kinsella’s introduction to sit alongside Barnes’s original 1986 essay makes the whole enterprise even more attractive.

John Kinsella, a Western Australian, a fine poet and for some years past a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, provides an introduction that is both personal and contemporary. It is personal in the sense that he weaves his own experiences into the lineaments of Lawson’s fictional world, giving it a renewed purchase in our own time. ‘For many years,’ he recalls, ‘I lived an itinerant life. Carrying a drinking problem and looking for occasional work, there was something of the swagman, and at times the sundowner, about me.

Baz Luhrmann’s epic film Australia may not have won any Oscars or attracted hordes of overseas tourists, but it has had at least one positive outcome. HarperCollins reissued Xavier Herbert’s equally epic Capricornia (1938), one of many acknowledged influences on the film, another being Herbert’s even longer novel, Poor Fellow My Country (1975). While visiting New Zealand recently, I was delighted to see the handsome new edition of one of Australia’s greatest novels prominently displayed in bookshops.

Any readers coming to Capricornia for the first time might initially think they are reading non-fiction rather than fiction, given its sober, documentary-style opening:

Although that northern part of the Continent of Australia which is called Capricornia was pioneered long after the southern parts, its unofficial early history was even more bloody than that of the others.

While Capricornia is rare among earlier Australian novels in having stayed almost constantly in print, more recent editions do not include the map that featured in the first. As well as helping to orient readers to the territory covered by the novel, the map serves notice that ‘Capricornia’ both is and is not a real place. The map is that of the Northern Territory, but Darwin has become Point Zodiac, just as, later in the novel, Melbourne becomes Batman; all other places and geographical features are also renamed. The latest edition of Capricornia does at least include the list of ‘Principal Characters’ that readers of the first edition also encountered before the opening sentence, another important guide omitted from many later ones. Before this list was restored a few years ago, a HarperCollins editor, clearly lacking a sense of humour, deleted some of the entries, specifically those referring to animals rather than humans. So there are now no references to ‘FALSE. A stockhorse at Red Ochre station’; to ‘MISANTHROPY. A stockhorse at Black Adder Creek’; to ‘KAPTLIST. A mule’; or to the even more memorably named donkeys, Poltix and Lidgin, despite their entries being cross-referenced to try to ensure no one missed the joke.

This year sees the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species. It also sees the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (1759–96). The media have been full of the Darwin anniversaries, but we have heard rather less about Burns, at least in Australia. Yet Burns is arguably as important as Darwin in our cultural formation.

Clearly, Burns did not influence our scientific understanding in the way that Darwin dominates our thinking (even for those who reject his ideas), although critics have claimed that one of his best known lyrics makes reference to the scientific interests of his time: ‘And I will luve thee still, my Dear, / Till a’ the seas gang dry. / Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear, / And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!’

Not that we normally think of this most moving of declarations as a product of the intense interest in geology in the Scottish Enlightenment. It is, after all, a love poem – we certainly wouldn’t turn to it for scientific understanding. Nor, despite his interest in geology, would we find anything elsewhere in Burns as metaphorically earth-shattering as Darwin’s theory of evolution. Yet Burns has been important in shaping our national psyche. If scientific theories mould our understanding of the world, so too do poems and songs – and Burns’s poems and songs have been widely known and loved since they first appeared.

When the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) opened in Canberra last December, more thoughtfulness was evident in its bookshop than the hang. The volumes are arranged by subject and in alphabetical order: the images accord to no principle beyond décor. Here are five writers; there, four scientists. The randomness of the whole embodies a culture of distraction. The root of this muddle is an evasion of whether the Gallery is to be guided by aesthetics or museology. The want of clarity is compounded by concern among staff not to be identified with a history museum.

Beyond these peculiarities, the objection to a portrait gallery for Australia is immanent in its reason for being. The enterprise began in 1992 as a travelling exhibition of ‘Uncommon Australians’, which I dissected in the September 1992 issue of 24 Hours under the headline ‘An Exhibition of Uncommon Snobbery’. My summation was that the undertaking combined ‘bad history and inadequate psychology with inferior art’. Nothing has improved.

From Beatrice to Julia

Jacqueline Kent chooses the most interesting biographical subjects. Her first was Beatrice Davis, doyenne of Australian book editors. A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, A Literary Life won the National Biography Award in 2002. Next came An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin (2008). Now we read with interest that she is writing the biography of Julia Gillard, the deputy prime minister.

Why Ms Gillard? ‘Mostly because I have been watching her for ages and find her very interesting,’ Jacqueline Kent told Advances. ‘Her handling of everything is apparently so effortless: what’s going on behind all that equanimity and friendliness? Also, Gillard indicates how far we have and haven’t come in dealing with women in public life. She’s a kind of politician we haven’t had before. She is also the most self-aware and secure and centred woman I have met in a very long time.’

Celebrating Calibre

Dear Editor,

This is a note to congratulate you on the quality of the latest Calibre Prize essays, by Jane Goodall and Kevin Brophy, in the April edition of ABR. The two pieces maintain the incredibly high standards of the Prize, of which I was honoured to be an inaugural judge.

As you know, I’m a staunch supporter of the essay. Walter Murdoch, one of only a handful of Australian writers to have specialised in the genre, once said that the ability to read and respond to essays demonstrated that a reader, and a culture, had ‘grown up’.

As the success of the Calibre Prize has demonstrated, the genre has really come into its own in recent times. I think this has something to do with the extraordinary events of recent years: readers are looking for understanding and analysis, as well as the joys of imagination.

At the Literature Board, we are always looking to support quality literary non-fiction. As a personal observation, let me add that this is one area where supply falls short of demand.

Keep up the good work, and let’s see the Calibre Prize go from strength to strength!

Imre Salusinszky, Chair, Literature Board

the gardens dyed silver. finally he was

less keen like an eaten bird, it wasnt my thing

the path diverged off course to a camp.

you were willing to grow a pomegranate inside.

here they were gods people with their quiet domestics,

the redheads were nicer however. the pram, was full with a baby,

‘dreaming’ of white museums. & white art.

    ‘Addio, valle di pianti’ –

    These the composer’s plainchant words

    No librettist dare rewrite

    At using up imprisoned air

    To sing like miners’ warning birds

    Inside the sunless atmosphere

And the world is fire.

And the sky wears a smoky veil.

And the bloodshot sun stares.

Can no longer comprehend the language

of the land –

Red Dress Walking is the promising début of Western Australian author S.A. Jones. A revealing look at friendships and love affairs, and the cumulative minutiae that make and break them, the novel consists of the alternating narratives of Will and Emily as they reflect upon their relationship and trace it from its unlikely origins to the coup de grâce.

The Book of Emmett, Melbourne journalist Deborah Forster’s first novel, offers a relentlessly grim but nonetheless engagingly written and often quite moving look at a distinctly dysfunctional family.

The novel is set mostly in Footscray, in Melbourne’s inner-west, and focuses on the life and death of the title character. Emmett Brown is extraordinarily contradictory. On the one hand, he is a ‘brutal’ alcoholic who instils fear into the hearts of his children and wife; conversely, he is revealed to be a ‘learned’ man who attempts to give his children the kind of cultural capital which he was denied during his own troubled childhood. He does this by exposing them to encyclopedias and the ballet.

When Donald ‘Donny’ Pinelli’s mother dies, he returns to Glasgow and confronts his past. Donny has been scarred by a dysfunctional family: mad clairvoyant mother; absent gangster father; shallow brother; belligerent sister. As a set-up, this is not particularly original, but Gary Bryson’s novel, Turtle, is full of surprises.

Adolescence can be a battlefield. From family, school and neighbourhood clashes to finding support during actual warfare, these four new books for young readers involve characters caught up in very different turf wars.

In Jessica Green’s Theodork (Scholastic, $14.95 pb, 177 pp), the battleground is school. Theodore’s first day of Year Seven does not go well. He falls over and lands on a teacher, insults the first person he talks to in front of the whole class, and earns the nickname (his first of many) ‘Theodork’. It’s enough to make you long for primary school, where life was simple and everyone got along. But Theodore is not to be put off: he hatches plan after plan to put things right and make new friends, with predictably comic and catastrophic results. He apologises to the people he has insulted, befriends the nerds, improves at sport – but all his strategies backfire. Friendship, Theo decides, ‘has nothing to do with liking each other … It turns out that friendship is actually a strategy of defence in a war. The war of life.’

When my husband died a while back, I was left with my memories and a house full of books. Harold was so ill, and for so long, that what I felt in those first few days after his death was a dulled feeling, ‘It’s over’. Not relief, certainly not joy, not even sorrow, but a blank sense of inevitability: ‘All over’: the end to the terrible struggle of the past few years, the harder struggle of the last few months, and the merciful oblivion of the last few days.

My husband had so many books, so lovingly collected. On various scraps of paper, inscribed at different times and places, he left contradictory instructions about what was to happen to his books when he died. Until I work out what to do, I have become caretaker of the books.

One Sunday during the final months, a good friend took me out for a respite lunch. I went with her to another house full of books. As I looked around the house I experienced

As you set out towards Ithaca / hope the way is long /

full of reversals, full of knowing

                                                       C.P. Cavafy

Young children often use the word ‘sad’ to describe negative or confusing emotions. ‘What you did made me sad,’ they will say. But children, as they get older, learn to offer richer explanations of interior states: grief, exasperation, shock, bewilderment, hurt, ecstasy and joy. It is language that gives us this flexibility of response. The best books offer us language that matches and sometimes even exceeds the richness of our experiences.