Rain bubble-wrapping the windows. Rain
falling as though someone ran a blade down the spines
   of fish setting those tiny backbones free. Rain
            with its squinting glance, rain

So much activity outside
where sunlight spills across the snow
like cream –

Since her début in 1971, Pam Brown has been a consistently intelligent and engaging presence in Australian poetry, if too often under-represented in those reputation-establishers, the anthologies. One pragmatic reason for this may lie in a further element of consistency, the formal structure of her poems. Poems that spin their way down the page, resolutely short-lined, or ones that fragment lines and thought into zigzag patterns across the breadth of the page, are faithful to the characteristics of the New Australian Poetry celebrated in John Tranter’s 1979 anthology of that title. They are characteristics that Brown has honed finely over the years. They are also, from the point of view of anthologists and, more powerfully, their publishers, wilfully heedless of that most brutal constraint, the number of pages available for any given anthology.

The play that made Samuel Beckett famous, Waiting for Godot (1953), must be the most unlikely box-office success in theatre history. Its upending of dramatic expectations – its bathetic preferencing of repetition over development, tedium over excitement – is an act of aesthetic brutalism as outrageous in its way as Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ four decades earlier. Yet its depiction of two grubby tramps waiting interminably for someone who never shows up has become a definitive representation of humankind’s state of metaphysical suspension. Life is a conceptual joke: we wait for an explanation that will never be given, beholden to someone or something that, if it is not nothing, might as well be nothing.

‘A large part of the beauty of a picture,’ Matisse famously decreed, ‘arises from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium.’ Struggle is the dominant motif in Murray Bail’s study of Scottish-born painter Ian Fairweather, first essayed in 1981, now refashioned, updated, and handsomely repackaged.

In the chapter on Fairweather’s work of the late 1950s and early 1960s – when he had been living in Australia on and off for a couple of decades – we are told that his art ‘was always a struggle. Struggle over one painting or a group could go on for more than a year, and the process itself became part of the “subject”.’ Such investments of effort and time have, surely, been the lot of any number of painters at various stages of their careers. Even the frothiest-seeming confectioners (from Boucher to Ken Done) will have had their moments of angst. But there is undoubtedly something more compulsive, more overt, more distinctive about Fairweather’s creative struggles, incarnated as they are in the asceticism of his materials and the (most un-Matisselike) circumscriptions of his palette. Wilfully or otherwise, could the limits of any medium be so stretched?

Gordon Kerry’s New Classical Music is a valuable addition to the small body of literature about Australian composers. The author sets out by placing his project in the context of several important earlier books on the subject, notably Roger Covell’s Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (1967) and the Frank Calloway–David Tunley collection of essays, Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century (1978). Kerry’s project is rather different from either of these, however; where Covell was consciously writing history (and perhaps deliberately shaping it at the same time), and where Calloway and Tunley commissioned independent articles on major composers, Kerry attempts something much more elusive – a more or less synchronic survey of the entire field in the last thirty years.

There seems to be an ever-growing – I almost wrote market, but think I mean obsession – these days for the family history, the personal memoir, the parading of how I spent my childhood/adolescence/ protest years/personal and economic growth decades, before-finally-contributing-to-the-joy-of-past-and-future-generations-by-listing-my-achievements. Many of these are self-published. Kristin Williamson’s biography of her playwright husband is not, but perhaps should have been.

It is hard to know where to begin with the problems in this 560-page slog through David and Kristin’s dinner parties, first nights, marital awkwardnesses and, above all, carping critics. The final photograph in the book, from October 2008, is a shot of ‘David relaxing on our veranda at Sunshine Beach, sans noise, sans pollution, sans critics’. Well, to continue the Shakespearian reference, one might add that, while the author, over twenty-two chapters and an epilogue, has little difficulty in showing that she is certainly not sans eyes and ears for every imagined and real slight, she can fill these pages with just about anything and everything that takes her fancy, and that her style and sense of what makes for an interesting biography are mostly sans taste.

Susan Varga’s latest novel, Headlong, is set in Australia in the opening years of the twenty-first century, with the Tampa episode and detention camps as background. This setting reflects Varga’s own work with refugees and the Nazi camps of her family’s Hungarian past. Headlong relates the downward spiral that the previously indomitable Julia undergoes after the death of her husband. Her two children – the narrator, Kati, and her brother – try everything to restore their mother to physical and mental health, but Julia is adamant: life is hell. The fact that she escaped the Holocaust with her daughter and survived the horror of those years makes the story all the more poignant and distinct from similar stories of grief. Why has this loss defeated her, when she has met every other challenge in life? Has it unlocked the hidden pain of earlier years? This question, and Kati’s ensuing grief and sense of guilt, sustain the novel.

‘There was a man who loved islands. He was born on one, but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many other people on it, besides himself.’ So begins D.H. Lawrence’s bleak little fable ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’. Lawrence’s islander wants control, sole possession, mastery of people and place. When his first island, fertile and beautiful, fails him because of the vast expense of making it perfect, he moves to a smaller one where, without love or desire, he drifts into marriage and fatherhood. Again he escapes. On the third and final island – a barren rock – his total isolation brings madness and death. The moral is clear. Lawrence thought of community as essential; without it we cannot be human.

The question of the relationship of the biographer to their subject is a fascinating one. Kath Jordan is frank about her long and intimate friendship with Veronica Brady as she recounts the way this book came into being. In a preface, she remembers celebrating with a friend the High Court’s rejection of Western Australia’s challenge to its Mabo native title decision, in March 1995. Thinking of Brady’s active involvement in Aboriginal rights issues, the two decided that they would write her biography. Brady gave her consent to the idea – although there is no sense that she was closely involved with the project – and what became the unexpectedly long gestation of Larrikin Angel was eventually begun, with only one author.

Larrikin Angel is a very readable, unpretentious, roughly chronological narrative of a significant Australian life. While there are too many anecdotes, usually affirmatory, about Brady from former students, colleagues, friends and public figures, and an irritating level of repetition – of assessment of Brady’s character, for instance, and sometimes of event or incident – the book is a valuable record of a remarkable woman. Jordan has unlimited admiration for her subject, and although she recognises from the beginning that Brady invites opposed responses from those she comes into contact with, having been ‘intensely hated … and equally intensely loved and respected’, the tone of the book is very much that of a loving friend.

It is fitting that ‘Waking’, a poem that links waking with birth, opens this inspired début collection from Emma Jones: ‘There was one morning // when my mother woke and felt a twitch / inside, like the shifting of curtains. // She woke and so did I.’ So the narrator-poet announces her arrival. The birthing theme continues in the next poem, ‘Farming’, in which pearls are ‘shucked from the heart of their grey mothers’. The same poem also foregrounds the poet’s interest in Ballard-like submerged worlds – oyster farms and shipwrecks, but also entire cities – and in the polarities of sky and sea. Indeed, this collection as a whole engages imaginatively with many dualisms: worldly/other worldly, internal/external, being/not being, self/other. Jones’s method is one of controlled playfulness, and despite many allusions to biblical themes and imagery, she avoids the didactic dualism of good/evil.

‘Zoos for the Living’ recounts the shifting of the town of Adaminaby for the Snowy River scheme, in doing so fingering colonisation while appropriating the Old Testament (think Adaminaby), Shakespeare, A.B. Paterson and The Beatles. Such a project could easily be overburdened with reference and with political posturing, but this poem and others like it work because Jones approaches her subject inventively and, often, with metafictional whimsy. Parrots are ‘clever ghosts, and blessèd among women’. A painting makes ‘the day in its own image’ (‘Painting’). The leitmotif of the (caged) parrot returns in ‘Zoos for the Dead’, Jones’s surrealist take on the removal of part-Aboriginal children, while the unnamed Jesus figure in ‘Sentimental Public Man’ provides a literal take on Christian imagery: ‘So I wore my heart on my chest, / all decorative. / And it flared like the hair of a parrot.’

This gifted poet creates a mesmerising menagerie.

The Gooneratnes’ mountain bungalow, overlooking rippling tea plantations, is called Pemberley, after Mr Darcy’s mansion. A wall plaque commemorates Elizabeth Bennet’s description of it. In the style of a modern Jane Austen, Yasmine Gooneratne takes up the enduring and universal question of who will marry whom, as Vikram Seth did in his mega-novel A Suitable Boy (1994), and at similarly entertaining length. The topic is Bollywood’s favourite too, but before writing The Sweet and Simple Kind, Professor Gooneratne, a specialist in eighteenth-century fiction and poetry, had not seen the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Not that she would be likely to. DVDs are much less important to the Gooneratnes than books, and conversation more valued than television. After contributing for three decades to the academic and medical life of Sydney, Yasmine and Brendon returned to Colombo a few years ago. They keep their distance from today’s troubled politics in their tear-shaped – or pear-shaped – country. As co-authors of This Inscrutable Englishman (1999), they recalled a British colonial period more benign – at least for their ancestors – than was the Raj in India. The British certainly made cultural converts in Ceylon, as Sri Lankan book lovers in Australia such as Ernest McIntyre, Michelle de Kretser and the Gooneratnes show.

Late in November 1916, the German commerce raider Wolf, laden with 100 tonnes of mines, set out on a journey of 100,000 kilometres across three oceans. After the ship reached home, in February 1918, 442 days later, its guns and mines had destroyed more than twenty Allied vessels. Hundreds of their crews and passengers had been held captive. When the voyage of the Wolf began, German U-boats were sinking hundreds of thousands of tonnes of shipping each month. The belated adoption of the convoy system drastically reduced those losses, so that the Germans, rather than the British, suffered the worse privation in the last year of the Great War. In that time, Wolf was the only German surface warship not penned up by the British naval blockade.

The long subtitle of Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen’s fine study of this remarkable and nearly forgotten story does not altogether do justice to the substance of their book. While following the course of ‘the most audacious warship of World War One and its fifteen-month campaign of terror against Australia and the world’, the authors incisively probe the conflicts and compromises between the German seamen and their prisoners, as well as the antagonisms of class and nationality among the hundreds held below decks in the Hell Hole of the Wolf. And then there was the disruptive effect on board of the young and perhaps flirtatious women who had also fallen into the clutches of the raider.

Marcella Polain’s latest book of poems continues her lyrical exploration of personal experience. Her earlier collections centred on immigrant life, shadowed by a violent history, in the adopted context of the Western Australian wheat belt. In the new poems, which occupy more than one third of the current volume, the emotional terrain has thickened, and the range of experience has expanded to include midlife concerns of failing health, ageing parents and death. ‘So this is what life is,’ Polain writes, ‘nausea, vertigo, migraine, cramps.’ One poem describes the extra chores of helping her mother, and ends: ‘Last Sunday you couldn’t remember who I was or / what you wanted me to buy for you.’

A clear strength of Polain’s work is its straightforward and emotionally charged imagery. In 1963 Robert Bly declared that American poetry had taken a wrong turn, and held up several, mainly Spanish-language poets as exemplars: poets whose work, he said, displayed an inner intensity lacking in more intellectual and contrived poetry. When Bly contrasted Lorca with William Carlos Williams, he said the difference lay in Lorca’s approach, which was based on ‘the absolute essentiality of the image’.

Our fascination with Gallipoli is probably at a peak. Like other symbolic events, it rises, falls and rises again in public esteem and curiosity. In the last quarter of a century, beginning when Anzac Day was at a low ebb, books and documentaries about Gallipoli have flooded bookshops and television stations. This new book by Professor Robin Prior, a specialist Australian historian of World War I, argues that the flood tide has almost drowned us in myths. The subtitle of his book is ‘The End of the Myth’. It is doubtful whether one able historian can terminate the myths, but this is a brave attempt.

A new book by the most learned, original and witty historian now living and writing in England – conceivably in English – is a rare treat. Because Keith Thomas’s academic career commenced in 1950s Oxford, it scarcely mattered that his first monograph – the prizewinning, much-acclaimed Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) – only appeared when its author was in his late thirties. For ‘publish or perish’ still then seemed little more than a joke, except across the Atlantic, where some of my senior colleagues in the history department at Johns Hopkins had doubts about inviting an apparently ‘unpublished’ Mr Thomas to read a paper early in 1971. (Not all knew his historiographical essays in the TLS and elsewhere, let alone his pioneering forays into gender history).

While many journals and anthologies are moving away from themed editions, the theme of this anthology is urgent and worthy. The royalties from Thanks for the Mammaries will go to the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF). Editor and NBCF ambassador Sarah Darmody writes eloquently in both the introduction and her autobiographical piece, ‘Frankenboob’, about her decision to have a prophylactic double mastectomy after discovering that she carried the gene that gave her an eighty-five per cent chance of developing breast cancer.

While the cause may be sombre, most of the stories – written by local and international authors such as Kaz Cooke, Kathy Lette, Marian Keyes, and Monica McInerney – are humorous. Some of the pieces invoke the indignity of having a bra fitting. Maggie Alderson’s ‘Storm in a G-cup’ contrasts the experiences of women in neighbouring fitting rooms, and humorously describes each woman’s dissatisfaction with their own breast size.

Of the twenty-five stories, ten are excerpts from Penguin novels or memoirs. Marian Keyes’s ‘Chicken Fillets and Plus Sizes’ is an extract from her novel This Charming Man (2008), and there is an extract from Sinead Moriarty’s In My Sister’s Shoes (2007), a novel about the relationship between two sisters after one is diagnosed with breast cancer. Jools Oliver writes openly about the joys and frustrations of breastfeeding in an excerpt from her memoir of pregnancy and mothering, Minus Nine to One (2006).

It seems mean-spirited to criticise such a book, but for the most part it fits into the category of ‘chick lit’, with all the accompanying limitations. Too often authors rely on clichés, and the writing can be simplistic and overstated. Of the few literary fiction pieces, the highlight is Brenda Walker’s account of her own experience with breast cancer, ‘The Peonies’, published here for the first time.

Apologists for torture often defend their walk on the dark side by invoking putative imperatives, such as protecting their communities from great evils. The paradigm is the ‘ticking bomb’ situation, where pre-empting catastrophe hangs on extracting information from uncooperative terrorists. The merging of combatants and innocents in modern warfare has highlighted the terrible dilemmas of ‘collateral damage’: how much intended or foreseen material destruction and killing of innocents can be justified in engaging your enemy? Then there are the ‘noble’ lies that politicians seem obliged to tell in protecting the larger interests of the nation.

The key theme of HEAT 19 is death. In 224 pages, a collection of Australian writers and academics pay homage to the departed in a range of essays, poems and short stories. The journal opens with Judith Beveridge’s moving and personal tribute to the poet Dorothy Porter. According to Beveridge, ‘Dot’ (as she was known to her friends) was a ‘consummate professional and her public performances were unfailingly polished’. However, Porter ‘also had a very fragile side, vulnerable to the pain of exclusion and rejection’. The title of Beveridge’s piece is ‘Trapper’s Way’, which is the name for a strip of land in the New South Wales suburb of Avalon where Beveridge once lived with Porter.

In the pieces that follow, bereavement becomes a recurring topic. I found the trio of stories by Mark Mordue particularly engrossing. These stories are assembled under the (somewhat crude) title ‘Dead Women’, and focus on Mordue’s relationship with his grandmother and a number of women who lived and died around her. Mordue displays a fine eye for detail and evokes a feeling of tenderness for a period in his life that is now gone but not forgotten. Also, I enjoyed Berndt Selheim’s poem ‘Still Life: 2001’. Selheim uses the 9/11 terrorist attacks to investigate how contemporary society has become desensitised to horror and violence. As Selheim puts it, ‘to wake up I got to set my skin on fire’.

A change of pace, both in terms of theme and genre, is the collection of photographs by Robyn Stacey. This collection, entitled ‘At Home with the Great and Good’, is dedicated to those ‘families whose interests and influences gave [Australia] gardens, museums and universities’. The photographs depict striking close-up images of fruit, wildlife, wine glasses and crockery.

Bittersweet and frequently moving, HEAT 19 is an ideal read for an icy winter’s night.

'It’s in your hands, Julianne,’ proclaims an e-mail from Barack Obama. So opens the latest Griffith Review, which explores the many ways that, across the globe, individuals and groups are taking social, political and environmental matters into their own hands. Addressee aside, the Obama e-mail sent to editor Schultz in the final week of the US election campaign landed in the virtual hands of millions. But as Schultz notes, the Obama campaign saw ‘social networking’ on a massive scale, made millions feel involved and, she posits, saw a concomitant end to the ‘era of mass media politics’. Marian Arkin’s memoir picks up on campaign engagement, recalling her involvement with a large-scale community of volunteer lawyers working to protect the integrity of the US election process. Arkin’s article provides a useful guide to those who find the US electoral college system a mystery.

Anna Coombs logs on to cyber activism via GetUp!, an organisation of 330,000 members who have become online activists. Coombs cites Howard government backdowns on the abortion pill, treatment of asylum seekers and ABC funding as examples of successful GetUp! actions, but acknowledges that measuring campaign effectiveness is difficult and that not all activists are progressives. Kate Cole-Adams’s wry account of Internet dating (‘like the first five minutes at an Ikea store – everything is possible and seemingly affordable’) and of observing her own ‘mating rituals’ makes engaging reading.

The principal essay, by Cheryl Kernot, moves offline and demonstrates the British origins of much ‘social entrepreneurship’. Kernot’s long enumeration of change driven by ‘third sector’ cooperatives, charities and volunteer schemes sometimes forfeits critical analysis, but her warning that worthy local innovations can become victims of their own success through adoption by centralised government is salutary.

Delights and jolts

Dear Editor,

ABR is always engaging, even when one disagrees with the thrust or standpoint of particular reviews, but surely the May issue is the most brilliant ever. An edition which has a poet (Peter Rose) reviewing David Malouf’s new novel, Brian Matthews on Henry Lawson, Elizabeth Webby on Xavier Herbert, and Robert Phiddian on Penny Gay’s monograph about Shakespearean comedies, has to be special, thoroughly deserving of the endorsements of literary luminaries with which ABR has promoted itself over the years. In fact, a writer who, as Dr Phiddian did, can use the phrase ‘industrial-strength literary-criticism’ in his first paragraph and one of my favourite words, ‘rebarbative’, in his second, has my unremitting admiration. And I haven’t yet mentioned the appearance of John Burnheim and Ian Britain on the Letters page.

Then there was Humphrey McQueen’s unexpected, if characteristically sharp-minded, essay on the new National Portrait Gallery. The enduring point about Humphrey’s writing is not whether one agrees with his arguments: it is his remorseless habit of compelling the reader to think that counts so strongly.

The concept behind this book is unusual and ambitious. In twelve essays centred on charismatic birds of Australia’s inland, the authors attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the ecology of arid Australia. They also hope that their writings will provide insights and inspiration about how humans might live there in a more sustainable way. Birds were selected as the linking theme of these essays because their ecology is comparatively well known, because their mobility increases the options available for surviving in the harsh and unpredictable desert environment, and because birds, to many readers, are the most familiar group of animals.

Along with regular features, this bumper edition of the Poets’ Union journal, Five Bells, includes the proceedings of festival discussions in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth: sixteen strongly argued, well-crafted papers by some of Australia’s best poets, variously considering the state of Australian poetry now. For all the individual interest of these papers, this collection’s strength lies in the way they set up parallels and contradictions, working together like a long, amiable argument.

Several quote Peter Rose’s introduction to The Best Australian Poems 2007: ‘Sales of individual poetry collections in Australia are worryingly low, regardless of how many prizes or good reviews they garner.’ There is no argument here; though, in an elegant paper on recent trends in poetry publishing, Bronwyn Lea points out that Australian poets sell better, adjusted for population, than poets in other Western nations. Rightly, Lea doesn’t find this reassuring. As the Spanish proverb goes, the misery of others is the consolation of fools. Low sales means Australian poets depend, precariously, on the commitment of independent publishers, who publish remarkable books without hope of return.

Dominic Knight’s début novel chronicles a life on hold. Its narrator, Paul Johnson, is a twenty-five-year-old law graduate from Sydney University. Single and living off his parents, he detests his job as a mobile DJ, yet also loathes the prospect of working in a legal firm like his friend, Nige, whose life ‘is a corporate T-shirt saying “work hard, play hard”’. Paul’s comic struggles to overcome indecision and inertia shape the narrative, and the inner-city culture of Sydney’s young professionals provide its backdrop.

Knight, a founding member of The Chaser comedy team, acknowledges that his novel may be ‘a thinly veiled whinge about his own life’. As a protagonist, Paul shares much in common with the diffident but questing young men found in the novels of Douglas Coupland, Nick Hornby and Benjamin Kunkel. Like them, Paul is experiencing an extended adolescence and is, to varying degrees, insightful, self-absorbed, humorous, cynical, bored, yearning and afraid. Whether you find this kind of contemporary male character intriguing or tedious will most likely determine your initial response to Disco Boy.

Give Paul time, though. As his work and romantic life become more complicated, Knight allows him to shed his veneer of hip fatigue. ‘I’d spent my life judging men who play games with women,’ he eventually admits, ‘saying I’d never do that, when the truth was that I’d simply never had the opportunity to be that guy.’ Consequently, he becomes more intriguing. Knight is especially attuned to the jokey, meta-conversational ways many young people have of approaching moments of emotional intimacy, as when Paul sleeps with one of his best friends and she remarks, ‘OK, I’m going to go and get dressed, and then we’re going to go and have a nice meal together and totally avoid this whole issue.’ These qualities, and Knight’s sense of pace, will keep you reading Disco Boy.

Ideal climate for writing

Climate change poses undoubted challenges for science – and society – but what exactly does the phenomenon mean for Australian cultural life? The University of Melbourne’s inaugural Festival of Ideas, June 15–20, investigates the question, with a program featuring scientists, environmentalists, architects, commentators, gallery directors, novelists and poets. The director, Patrick McCaughey, has secured a keynote address from Miles Franklin winner Kate Grenville, as well as panel appearances from Steven Carroll, Don Watson, Barry Jones, and Lisa Gorton and more over the Festival’s five-day duration. All sessions are free. Full details are available at www.ideas.unimelb.edu.au.

It is a common assumption that nothing much happens in small country towns; that they are insular places where people live their entire lives, unchallenged by the outside world. But I never found the towns I lived in to be stagnant: conservative and sometimes small-minded, yes, but never uniformly dull. Individuals and families come and go; people run away or arrive, seeking refuge; people return after years of absence to settle down again.

The quirky country town and the tensions beneath its apparently placid surface has proved to be tempting territory for Australian novelists. Indeed, it is something of a cliché. Kristina Olsson’s The China Garden and Jennifer Mills’s The Diamond Anchor explore this familiar ground with varying degrees of success. They are interested in what it means to come from somewhere marginal, to know its people and landscape intimately. Both are concerned with the undertow of memory and emotion that draws their characters to a particular geographical place. But how their characters sort through their memories is a point of difference.

‘It wasn’t like that in the book’ is one of the commonest and most irritating responses to film versions of famous novels. Adaptation of literature to film seems to be a topic of enduring interest at every level, from foyer gossip to the most learned exegesis. Sometimes, it must be said, the former is the more entertaining, but this is no place for such frivolity.

There are two contrasting and equally unproductive approaches to this phenomenon. The first one, favoured by those whose background is wholly in film, holds that ‘a film is a film’ and that there is no place for consideration of its literary antecedent. The second is to invoke the notion of ‘fidelity’ to the source book as a yardstick for evaluating the film adaptation. I want to suggest that it is all but impossible when viewing the film version of a novel one knows well, and values, not to have the novel in mind at some level of consciousness; and that fidelity, though admirable in marriage, is beside the critical point.

Self-evidently, the short story demands precision. The term ‘short story’ more than likely brings to mind the magazine-length sprint or the rapidly delivered epiphany. John Updike was a master of this demanding form. In his Olinger and Tarbox tales, characters are assembled quickly and sent to their fate with little delay. Never cursory, this was writing performed under haiku-like restraint. In the short stories of Wendy James and Tom Cho, we are presented with similarly brief and precise tales of two different Australian landscapes: one as small as a kitchen, the other as capacious as an arena. Why She Loves Him is James’s first story collection after two well-received novels. For the most part, the stories are quiet and domestic affairs. Her characters are frequently repressed and restrained, filled with rage that is rarely given voice. If the short fiction of some novelists feels too constrained, James’s evocation of despair is perfectly suited to these short bursts.

The stories, even by the genre’s standards, are fragmented creations. Rather than offering the reader unbroken chronological narratives, James’s stories, often within a page of starting, are halted by sudden retreats into the past or fractured by the intrusion of new voices. This method allows for what a single narrative strand often precludes: ambiguity, uncertainty, complication. The stories are skilfully compressed. The voices here commingle but never connect, ultimately resigned to communication in a void.

The price the collection pays for its sustained look into suburban alienation is the absence of almost any kind of humour. Offering little relief to the reader, James’s carefully sketched creations border on caricature. Another problem is the book’s terse paragraph construction. Prose seemingly in rude health is soon cut off. It starts to get samey. Very samey.

Though the collection spans ten years, the recent stories tend to be the strongest. One of these later stories, ‘Brush Off’, is a telling investigation into modern manners (or the lack thereof), centred on a lunchtime meeting of old friends. The story employs James’s standard method of toggling between present and past. What is lost in momentum is gained in precisely observed frustration and disappointment. Another strong piece, ‘How It Is’, this time about the unspoken terror of motherhood, is in its quiet way as bleak and terminal as its Beckettian namesake.

James’s language rarely seeks escape from the familiar. Skies are always ‘deep blue’; girls are frequently ‘tall and brown’. Occasionally, she reaches for an opening of fugitive poeticism, a brief escape from blunt sentences to come. This is the evocative opening of ‘Flat Earth’: ‘From her kitchen window she can see her son’s cubby, one end of the clothesline, a patch of lawn, a piece of sky.’ Or this, from ‘Diving’: ‘The little girls clamber up onto the rock, wave, shout, pose, then swoop like two thin ribbons of water.’ Her other habit, perhaps too frequently deployed, is the sudden burst of italicised interiority (‘Oh Christ, I can’t even remember if I brought it with me. Christ. Did I have it this morning? Think. Think. Think’).

James is attempting an exceptionally difficult mode of writing. It seeks to portray honestly the lives of trapped or disillusioned characters, in unvarnished and clear-eyed language. Nonetheless, James pays her creations sufficient respect, and allows them the intermittent escape of rhetorical flight. That her stories are occasionally marred by flatness or overwriting is a small price to pay. They are otherwise quiet marvels.

Look Who’s Morphing, Tom Cho’s first collection of stories, is a radically different affair. In his best writing (‘Pinocchio’, ‘Learning English’), there is a witty and playful approach to notions of stable sexuality and identity. In place of the old boundaries and certainties, Cho’s world is vertiginous and slick, and sincerity is the first thing to go. With a supporting cast of relatives along for the ride, Cho tries on pop forms with a Twitter-like impatience: Dirty Dancing, Godzilla, The Bodyguard and The Sound of Music. From story to story, these modern myths are rejigged and recast as porno comedies, rockstar fantasies, daytime confessions.

For a while, the book is fast-paced and breezily amusing. Somewhere mid-point, weariness descends. No one ever asked much of the material Cho is utilising for parody and pastiche, but between covers, in that old-fashioned object called a book, something more is required. Rather than using junk, the junk begins to use Cho. What possible reaction can one have when presented with sentences such as, ‘On Oscars night, Whitney Houston is understandably nervous about her safety’, or ‘I was part of a menagerie of Muppets that was accompanying guest star Roger Moore in his closing number’? Try a paragraph of it on for size, this time taken from the title story:

We decided to skip lunch and instead drove straight to my place to have sex, me as the construction worker from The Village People and her as the man who was wearing a leather cap and leather jeans. We were already kissing each other frantically as I opened the front door. Tara wanted sex very badly. She told me that she had never done it with an Asian guy who had morphed into Dr Quinn from Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, then into the construction worker from The Village People.

This is writing as karaoke: bliss for the person with the microphone and his inebriated friends; mounting impatience for everyone else.

At this point, I feel the need to lay my pop credentials on the table, or at least assert my love for a healthy amount of cultural detritus. To speak of the pop culture morphed and mangled in the book with such a slighting tone may perhaps be the sign of a dedication to embarrassingly dated standards, but the book, with its often playful but finally exhausting triviality, goads the reader. By the book’s end I wanted to slap the Bodyguard DVD out of Cho’s hand and replace it with a Fassbinder compilation, the whole time insisting in an entirely foolish manner that there was such a thing as objective quality. The world that created Dirty Dancing also produced The Band Wagon. The culture responsible for Fantasy Island is also responsible for Hancock’s Half Hour.

Of course, any dropped name is as ‘good’ as any other in this realm of po-mo mix and match, based as it is solely on private enthusiasms. Surely this is one of Cho’s points, and the trash of the past has of late returned too often with a new-found cultural prestige for me to dismiss the possible immortality of a Patrick Swayze vehicle. Still, the relativism tires. That the relentless polymorphic shapeshifting in the book carries with it the cultural weight of migrant experience and gender swapping is, finally, beside the point. The extended conceit isn’t strong enough, or vigorous and various enough, to sustain a thematically linked story collection. Eventually, some morphs really are better than others.

Cho, to be fair, is operating in a complicated field, and handling apparently simple yet fundamentally unstable material. The transience of pop is, hysterical tone acknowledged, a dangerous thing indeed to allow into the realm of literary fiction, filled as it is with old-fashioned notions of timelessness. Too much product placement and junk kills literary prose. Besides, pop sustains itself with a remorseless logic. It does not need literature’s approval, and it certainly does not need extended homage and worship in the place of critique and satire. The book’s back-cover blurb, offering the possibility of a ‘fundamental questioning of the nature of identity’, seems optimistic at best. Beyond Look Who’s Morphing’s surface excitement and drollery, little is truly interrogated. The playfulness contains no higher aims than its own delight, which is, inevitably, an ever-contracting circle of narcissism. It is a glimmering and occasionally dazzling début, but weightless and, finally, affectless.

Late in 2005, after months of delicate negotiations, the National Library of Australia announced a remarkable coup: the purchase of a previously unknown collection of fifty-six watercolours of botanical and ornithological subjects drawn and painted in Sydney in the years 1788–90, the cradle period of European settlement in Port Jackson. The significance of these paintings, unsigned and undated, had for many years gone unrecognised. The watercolours, apparently acquired as early as 1792, had been held in England over several generations by the Moreton family, the Earls of Ducie. Over several generations, their significance had apparently been overlooked or simply not understood; in time, the portfolio, though safely held, had been forgotten. It came to light in 2004 during a routine valuation of the estate of Basil Moreton, sixth Earl of Ducie. The eventual sale was negotiated with representatives of the present and seventh Earl, David Moreton, who was committed to honouring his family’s long connection with Australia on properties in Queensland. But before that, it was necessary to identify the works more definitively beyond their (then) presumed Australian subject matter.

It is ‘Schoolies’ Week’, and Waterloo, on the Mornington Peninsula, hosts a crowd of teenagers who, for various reasons, shun more fashionable parties on the Gold Coast. The police try to ensure that the kids practise safe sex and don’t become victims of their own excesses with drugs and alcohol, nor of the ‘toolies’ who scavenge the festival fringes. Liaison officer Constable Pam Murphy, recently transferred to detective duties, has encountered few serious problems but warns her superiors that an impending lunar eclipse could produce ‘the ultimate high’.

In Blood Moon, Garry Disher’s writing will excite fans of crime fiction. Inspector Hal Challis and Sergeant Ellen Destry are searching for the person who assaulted the now-comatose Lachlan Roe, a chaplain at the exclusive Landseer School. Roe’s brother Dirk works for Ollie Hindmarsh, a conservative MP and aggressive campaigner on law and order issues. The Roes have fundamentalist religious views and, as Challis discovers, they also disseminate white supremacist propaganda; so the list of suspects for the bashing is lengthy. Even a member of Challis’s team, Scobie Sutton, resents Lachlan’s influence on his wife, who spends most of her waking hours by the chaplain’s hospital bed.

Blow Out is Rae Desmond Jones’s first collection of poetry, punctuated by novels and plays, since The Palace of Art (1981). His prominence during the 1970s is evinced by his publishing four books of poetry within eight years and by his inclusion in John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry (1979). This is a long silence, but Jones, now in his late sixties, has filled it with political activism, serving as mayor of Sydney’s Ashfield Council from 2004 to 2006. So much for unacknowledged legislators.

Providence, understood as God’s governance and care of the world, has an important place in religion. Church leaders speak of it with a view to giving comfort in adversity, especially when there has been large-scale loss of life, as in terrorist attacks or earthquakes. There is often some defensiveness in this appeal to providence because of the tension between belief in a loving and all-powerful God and the occurrence of what could be seen as preventable evil. Genevieve Lloyd – the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia, now retired – discusses providence in Christian belief, especially in considering Augustine’s thoughts, in late antiquity, on divine justice and the ‘ordering’ of evil, and Leibniz’s bold attempt, in early modernity, to reconcile divine providence with evil, and freedom with necessity, in ‘the best of all possible worlds’. There is attention, too, to Voltaire’s sharp critique of facile optimism, and to Hume’s sceptical probing of what can be known with certainty in these matters. More generally, Providence Lost explores the long tradition of philosophical inquiry, from the Greek tragedians to modern times, that gave rise to a range of different conceptions of providence in the context of human freedom, necessity, fate and fortune.

There was a party when I first came to this country. The table was heavy with plates of pizza and chicken balls and Turkish dips with sticks of celery that no one touched. Balloons clustered on the ceiling, trying to escape the heat of the room. A badly lit fire in the fireplace sent out curls of smoke, and a double-bar radiator sat burning in the opposite corner.

‘This is my Filipino brother-in-law, Enrico,’ Alan said each time he introduced me, grasping my arm or giving me a playful punch. At that point, the person I was meeting would clap my shoulder and say, ‘Welcome to Australia!’ as if they had rehearsed this gesture for my arrival.

‘I told everyone all about you,’ my sister Estrella had said the first night, before the party, before the bad feeling entered the house and hung around the ceiling like the shrivelled party balloons that Alan, her husband, keeps forgetting to take down. She said this in English, loudly, so that he would hear from the next room.

‘I told them how you used to call me Bibby, and how sad you were when I had to go to another country to find work. You cried on the phone and begged me, “Bibby, please come home.” And I had to tell you to get off the phone and put Mama on the line, that Mr Kelly was paying for me to call from Hong Kong and he would be angry at a little boy in the Philippines wasting his money.’

The front cover of Black Dust Dancing depicts the silhouette of a child playing on swings against the backdrop of a blood-red sky. This image suggests the suspense and dread that is missing from the novel, which is, for the most part, slow and uneventful.

 Dancing, set in a rural South Australian town, opens with young mother Heidi becoming puzzled by her son Zac’s sudden ill health. This malady is eventually attributed to the ‘traces of historic lead’ found in the black dust that blows through the town. Zac’s diagnosis is made by Caro, a local doctor who is having difficulties (albeit of an emotional kind) with her own daughter, and whose own health is threatened by her penchant for cigarettes and alcohol.

And now ’tis done: more durable than brass
My monument shall be, and raise its head
O’er royal pyramids: it shall not dread
Corroding rain or angry Boreas,
Nor the long lapse of immemorial time.

(Horace, Odes, III.xxx)

With what other words could one possibly begin a paper on philanthropy? Here we have the Roman poet Horace in full celebratory mode: his memorial will outlast even hard metal. What’s more, it comes at the end of the third book of Horace’s Odes, so many of which are dedicated to that legendary philanthropist Maecenas, who has given his very name to the arts of philanthropy, and who was the patron not just of Horace but also of Virgil and Propertius. Of course, then as now, Maecenas’s philanthropy was not altogether innocent, as even these poets suggest. Ultimately, the exquisite poetry of this Golden Age was in honour of the one and only emperor, Augustus, lauding his beneficence and the prosperity of his reign.

Alberto Dominguez identified himself as un Australiano de habla hispana – a Spanish-speaking Australian. As such, he gave enormously to the Spanish-speaking community of Sydney. Dominguez was a radio broadcaster with SBS and community radio stations in western Sydney, and a founding member of several Latin American cultural organisations. For many Spanish-speaking Australians who came as refugees from Latin America, Dominguez’s radio-voice provided them with essential information and helped them settle in. Yet when he died as a passenger aboard American Airlines flight 11, which struck the northern tower of the World Trade Centre in September 2001, most media in Australia identified him only as an Uruguayan-born migrant, a father of four and a Qantas baggage-handler. There was little mention of his work in radio, or his prominence amongst the Spanish-speaking community. Bel Vidal, whose essay opens this anthology of stories, essays and poems, asks that Australians remember Dominguez – the first Australian to die in the World Trade Centre attacks – as more than a migrant who, decades after his arrival, still lacked fluency in English. Vidal, herself a migrant from Bolivia, argues that the civic contributions made by Dominguez in his first language deserve a place in Australian history and culture.

Food is always a winning ingredient in books for children. Mini-chocoholics will devour I Like Chocolate (Wilkins Farago, $24.99 hb, 28 pp), a delicious book that celebrates the delights of chocolate consumption. Davide Cali has produced an enthusiastic and humorous book with gentle messages about sharing and caring, and eating in moderation. Shaped like a large block of chocolate, I Like Chocolate is ‘sugar-free, won’t melt in your pocket and contains no traces of nuts!’ It is almost as satisfying as a really good truffle.