A poet friend, getting wind that I was reviewing the two latest ‘Bests’ and wishing to satirise the reviewing platitudes that sometimes greet the arrival of such anthologies, offered the following advice: ‘Remember to say that both collections are a welcome addition to the literary landscape and that both editors have included some welcome new voices in Australian poetry.’ Peter Rose’s The Best Australian Poems 2008 and David Brooks’s The Best Australian Poetry 2008 provide commendable surveys of a year in Australian poetry. Both include ‘new voices’ as well as sonorous old ones. Variations in quality inevitably occur, but many of the ‘new’ offerings are excellent and few, if any, are duds. This can only be welcomed.

As he stepped down from the podium at the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln was unhappy. The speech was short and finished abruptly. The crowd was slow to clap. Lincoln turned to friend and occasional bodyguard Ward Lamon. ‘That speech won’t scour,’ he told Lamon. ‘It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed.’

Lincoln placed great value on persuasion through carefully prepared speeches. The Gettysburg Address summed up his key ideas developed over a decade: that America is a unique experiment in human history, a republic based on the equality of individuals, an ideal so important that civil war must be fought and won so that government by, for and of the people should not perish from the earth.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe has always had a good ear for a title, but Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw is surely his best. Half a century older than Shakespeare’s ghost-ridden poet–hero, he rings the changes on Hamlet’s high-fantastical play with language, by turns delighting and disconcerting an audience which might sometimes struggle to keep up with his leaps and ellipses. Ghosts and shadows abound in this distillation of his finest work from the last five years or so, but the intimations of mortality don’t mean that this book inhabits a Yeatsian ‘country for old men’. There are some curtains of Celtic darkness, but the soul of this poet–singer rejects tattered coats and sticks, swaggering, as the introductory poem has it, ‘On the Side of Life, / suntanned here in the lost antipodes / of childhood’s yellow beach and glaucous water’.

In his début novel, Street Furniture (2004), Matt Howard displayed a certain droll, youthful touch that endeared him to readers and critics alike. Taking Off sees him continuing in the same vein, taking another twenty-something protagonist and pushing him into unfamiliar territory, to clever effect.

Like many people, I am addicted to a segment called ‘Talking Pictures’ on the ABC’s Insiders programme, hosted by Mike Bowyers. The three minutes are over in a flash. In fact, the brevity is well judged: humour needs understatement, not overkill. Watching those cartoonists for that short time, cheerful and amused as they invariably are in the face of folly, bastardry and disaster, the viewer is lifted above the baffling maelstrom, with a cleared head, steadied balance and restored vision. Of course, it can’t last. Comic Commentators, a collection of essays investigating political cartooning in Australia, is generously illustrated by a selection of nearly 120 cartoons that represent the output of Australia’s current crop of cartoonists. Two notable absences are Michael Leunig and John Spooner, both deferred to on several occasions, but not much discussed, and not illustrated. Fourteen contributions, arriving from many directions, converge: we hear from five practising cartoonists, an editor and an art curator, an academic lawyer with expertise in defamation and sedition, a social scientist and three academics in, respectively, the disciplines of government, politics and literature and culture. It is a productive mixture.

PANACHE. Both in its literal meaning (a plume of feathers) and its more familiar extended one, the term might have been invented for stage critic extraordinaire Kenneth Tynan as plausibly as for Robert Helpmann, one of last century’s most flamboyant and versatile stage practitioners. The illegitimate Tynan’s middle name was Peacock (the surname of his Birmingham father). Helpmann (born plain Robert Murray Helpman – one ‘n’ – in Mount Gambier, South Australia) will always be associated with the lyrebird, nominal subject and central symbol of perhaps his most original creative achievement, The Display, the dance-drama he choreographed for the Australian Ballet in 1964. In looks, each was very striking – and strikingly alike, though Helpmann was eighteen years older than Tynan, and their common resemblance (below as well as above the neck) was more to some exotic, sinuous reptile than to any species of bird.

There are many good reasons for destroying books. Not every act of destruction is an attempt to suppress ideas. Publishers pulp excess stocks of unsold titles; booksellers and libraries do it; even you and I do it. You don’t want to keep every school textbook you ever owned, and the nice people down at the Op Shop won’t thank you for dumping your discards on them. Our state and national libraries keep publishers’ deposit copies of every book produced in their jurisdictions – these are copies of last resort. If you attack them, you are attacking the cultural memory of human- kind; if you empty your own book- shelves onto a bonfire, you have merely gone overboard with spring cleaning.

Burning Books is not a lament for lost treasures. It is an investigation of the phenomenon of book burning in the 1930s and 1940s. The twin termini are the Nazi book burnings of 1933, and the denazificiation of Germany after the Allied victory. Both episodes involved large-scale destruction of books. The deliberate wrecking of culture and ideas is a terrible thing, and most writers who address it cannot get very far past their instinctive horror of the act. Matthew Fishburn’s power and originality spring from his ambivalence. He confesses ‘a certain sympathy with destruction, a desire to climb out from under the forbidding weight of text’. ‘The language of destruction,’ he writes, ‘is so thinly separated from the language of renewal, that there is some- thing emotionally rich in the prospect of a great purging bonfire of the accumulation of the past.’

In 2006, forty years after the publication of his first novel, Rappaport, which featured the comic misadventures of a Melbourne Jewish antique dealer, Morris Lurie was awarded the Patrick White Award. He is one of those remarkably durable Australian writers who have extended their careers into a fifth decade. Principally known as a short story writer, published widely in Australia, but also in the New Yorker, Punch and, appropriately, the Transatlantic Review, Lurie’s latest work is his first book of fiction since Seventeen Versions of Jewishness: Twenty Examples in 2001. From Hybrid Publications, To Light Attained is, in its formal essence and central moral issue, a novella, and a fine one.

The novella often deals with intense relationships of intimate dependency between two people, which is often only dissolved through the death of one of them. And that is the case in To Light Attained. We are given notice of what is to come in the novel’s epigraph (drawn from early in the book): ‘How do you write about a child who died? … A child who said enough. A child who finished. A child who said, in our most unsayable way, this child, no more.’ The father is a successful author in his late fifties, Herschel Himmelman, ‘for adults and children the writer’, long separated from his wife, but trying by every desperate and unavailing stratagem to stay close to his daughter and to protect her from the harm that he is sure will befall her.

Past the final service station
into the green beyond of paddocks
soon to be carved up, quartered,
then watched over by streetlights.
In the post-work haze, nostalgia reigns:
lonely crossroads, abandoned weatherboards,
paddocks stretching down to the sea.
The involved stares of other drivers –
resolute, familiar, alone.
The busyness of the day explaining itself
yet like a student in an afternoon class
I’m toey, doubtful – was I too hard?

Public passion and debate about Australia’s indigenous peoples ebb and flow. During the 1990s, Mabo, Wik, reconciliation and the Stolen Generations dominated public debate for months on end. Indigenous leaders such as Pat and Mick Dodson, Lowitja O’Donohue and Noel Pearson became familiar figures, prodding politicians and the public to remember unfinished business. As the official reconciliation process ground to a halt during the Howard government, Aboriginal issues receded into the background. They re-emerged spectacularly in 2006 with the cataloguing of widespread sexual and physical abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. This was in the lead-up to the government’s Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory.

Marisa Raoul’s memoir recounts the ten years she spent living and working with her husband in France. With French travel memoirs lining bookshop shelves – such as Ellie Nielsen’s Buying a Piece of Paris (2007), Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do) and Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (both 2008) and, of course, Peter Mayle’s wildly popular A Year in Provence (1991) – Raoul is treading safe, and commercially viable, waters.

In the early 1990s Raoul meets her future French husband, Jean (to readers’ chagrin, all French words are italicised in Ma Folie Française), while working as an air hostess. Within hours she knows that Jean is the one (‘He literally charmed the pants off me’), and the pair falls rapturously in love. In between their working holidays in the world’s most exotic locales, they move into a ‘one-bedder’ in Manly.

There is an unfortunate tendency in contemporary fantasy for plots to become elongated, ungainly and unmanageable, much like teenage boys. Thankfully, Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series is an exception, perhaps because the protagonist, Arthur Penhaligon, is not yet a teenager himself.

Two months ago, I was in Islamabad to address an international conference on suicide terrorism. The Pakistani army was engaged in heavy fighting with the Islamic militants in the Pashtun-dominated northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan. The security situation was deteriorating. Senior Pakistani intelligence officers were worried that it would lead to an escalation of suicide attacks. Their assessment was supported by the other government officials, including doctors working in the region, who told me of the widespread perception among Pashtuns that the predominantly Punjabi Pakistan army was committing genocide of the Pashtun nation and was thus turning the population against the army. The aerial bombings by Pakistani helicopter gunships and the US-NATO drones were causing many civilian casualties.

I heard reports of suicide bombings spreading to other cities in the country. Ten days after I left Islamabad, the Marriott Hotel where I had been staying was destroyed by a devastating suicide attack. Since then there has been a marked increase in daily suicide attacks in Pakistan. The news from Afghanistan, where the Australian army is fighting the insurgent Taliban, is becoming bleaker by the day.

Sir James Murray, the famous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, believed that the dictionary-maker’s job was to furnish each word with a biography.

In Speaking Our Language, the Australian lexicographer Bruce Moore has taken Murray’s dictum to its ultimate conclusion: he has furnished a biography of our nation using its words – their pronunciation, meaning and form. The result is a story rooted in fine scholarship and research, told with a skilful lightness of touch.

Judith Armstrong

I want to recommend one book only: The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s Penguins and the Warming of Australia (Allen & Unwin), by Meredith Hooper, an Australian woman living in Cambridge. This is a lovely book, beautifully written, with deep concern for both science and story. It is a study of the effects of rising temperatures on the small Adélie penguins at Palmer Station on Anvers Island in the Antarctic. How, against all odds, did The Ferocious Summer so entrance me? It is not just the arresting message it carries – that climate change is something specific and local, delivering ‘sudden blows or glancing whacks’, rather than throwing a warm blanket over the earth. Its sad effects on baby penguins (low birthweight, failed eggs) is the central evidence in this unfolding reality, but so is that of the colony of volunteer scientists and support people, who brave blizzards to make their observations, and live in accommodation so limited that personal space is almost non-existent. Hooper’s ability to convey in sensitive and singular language the intimate interaction between nature and humans, birds and researchers, the sea, the ice and the land, is deeply moving. The book was entered in a state literary competition; the five-person panel, of which I was the convenor, was unanimous in awarding it first prize. But, because the author is unknown here, the news sank like a stone. This is my attempt to publicise a superb piece of writing.

Judith Beveridge

There have been some impressively strong first collections of poetry published in 2008, but I am singling out Carol Jenkins’s Fishing in the Devonian (Puncher & Wattmann) for its brilliant use of scientific themes and for its imaginative and linguistic panache. This book is both a joy and a revelation, as is Sarah Holland-Batt’s first collection Aria (UQP), which is so accomplished you might think she had several publications already. David Brooks’s fourth collection The Balcony (UQP) is astonishing for its rich, gratifying clarity and masterful sensuality. I also loved Martin Harrison’s Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems (UWA Press) which speaks eloquently and wisely on so many levels, a real tour de force. Robert Adamson’s The Golden Bird: New and Selected Poems (Black Inc.) is arranged by way of theme rather than chronology, a splendid testimony to Adamson’s consistent, miraculous work. A must-have for anyone.

Geoffrey Blainey

Three specialist books – off the main highways – deserve credit. Philip Payton’s Making Moonta: The Invention of Australia’s Little Cornwall (University of Exeter Press) is the story of a South Australian copper town that was celebrated for its Cornishness. The Navy and the Nation: The Influence of the Navy on Modern Australia (Allen & Unwin) is a collection of original essays on how the navy shaped Australia’s history, especially in peacetime. Edited by David Stevens and John Reeve, it ranges from scurvy and ship-building to the potential peril arising in New Caledonia after France’s collapse in 1940. Countless family histories are now published each year. One of the most engaging is the Road to Bulong: A History of the Jones Family of Hampton Hill (Hesperian Press), the story of how the Joneses managed to survive the ups and downs in the pastoral and gold country beyond Kalgoorlie – home of the Wonji people.

Neal Blewett

2008 has been a year of catching up. All my books are paperbacks, which may help with seaside reading. Although self-serving and self-censored, Alistair Campbell’s diaries, The Blair Years (Arrow), provide a mesmerising, intimate account of Tony Blair’s first nine years as Britain’s Labour leader and prime minister. In Colonial Ambition: The Foundation of Australian Democracy (MUP), an account of the struggle for the intertwined but distinct ambitions for responsible government and democracy in New South Wales, Peter Cochrane proves that colonial political history need not be dull. He makes the duel between William Wentworth and his liberal and radical opponents as exciting as that between Gladstone and Disraeli in Great Britain a decade later. Hitler’s biographer, Ian Kershaw, in Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World (Penguin), takes ten critical decisions made by the Allied and the Axis powers over eighteen months in 1940–41, and examines the forces and personalities involved in their resolution. Although the decisions themselves are familiar, Kershaw’s comparative approach and his mastery of the sources makes for an original and refreshing take on a set of decisions that shaped the history of the second half of the twentieth century. 

James Bradley

The two books that impressed me most this year were both by at least nominally Irish writers. The first was Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (Fourth Estate), a book which, several not insignificant caveats aside, seemed as elegant and profound a meditation on the post-national world as one might hope to find. The second was Anne Enright’s unnervingly intelligent collection of stories, Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape). As raw and thrilling as writing can be, they move from the elegiac to the blackly witty to the genuinely chilling with almost alarming facility. From the opposite side of the Atlantic, I was enthralled by Denis Johnson’s Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke (Picador), a book which, for all its flaws, stands with DeLillo’s Underworld, both for the scale of its ambition and the visionary intensity of its language. And last, but certainly not least, Tim Winton’s beautifully compressed Breath (Hamish Hamilton), a book which confirms Winton’s status as one of the best writers working anywhere in the world.

Ian Britain

Not all academic writing, as so many publishers seem to assume these days, is necessarily bad – nor unmarketable. If you want to find a specimen of it at its gleaming, digestible best, try the appropriately named Alison Light, author of Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (1991). If you keep it by your bedside, her recent foray into social history, Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service (Fig Tree), will prevent you from getting to sleep. This view of Bloomsbury from below as well as above stairs lends that rarefied world a dramatic depth and perspective that even the best of its previous chroniclers have scarcely afforded us. It is heartening to see that Penguin has appreciated the book’s commercial potential with a handsome paperback edition. Picador has had the wisdom to splurge lavishly on the design for Robert Dessaix’s inspired ruminations on or about André Gide, Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives. This book’s partial origins in its author’s academic training in European literature are well (and properly) hidden, but they provide the solid grounding for its soaring scintillations.

Alison Broinowski

Few Australian writers are bold enough to question America’s assumption that it can dominate the world while defying its rules, but United States-resident, Indian-born Parag Khanna is. Writing well before the present economic crisis, in The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (Allen Lane), he authoritatively describes the gathering geopolitical mutiny, led by countries in Central Europe, East Asia, South America and the Middle East, against the United States. The reasons for it should be better understood in Australia. Richly deserving its many awards, The Lost Dog (Allen & Unwin) ranges further across what Michelle de Kretser calls ‘the empire of imagination’, replete with ‘wonders that existed beyond the rim of perception’. The individual realities of an Anglo-Indian-Australian man and a Chinese-Australian woman are only two among a rich array of inter-cultural possibilities. Nam Le defies prejudice against short story collections with outstanding success in The Boat (Hamish Hamilton). His global range embraces ‘lesbian vampires and Columbian assassins and Hiroshima orphans and New York painters with haemorrhoids’.

Glyn Davis

An Iliad (Vintage), by novelist Alessandro Baricco, affirms the spoken word as the heart of Homer’s poetry. Written for recital and stripped of the gods, Baricco’s Iliad constantly shifts voice between the players. In simple, elegant prose, Baricco mourns windy Troy. Gentle sadness also pervades Don Watson’s American Journeys (Knopf). Fascinated by poor and marginalised America, Watson travels the trains, glimpsing lives that should provoke anger but are instead given shape by American optimism and religious conviction. Yet America has endured hard times before: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster), a brilliant political biography finally given local release, traces how Lincoln held his government together through civil strife. Goodwin examines the women and men around the Lincoln cabinet, and the better angel who fought a war for a principle, but promised a peace with malice to none.

Ian Donaldson

I particularly admired this year Lisa Gorton’s Press Release in the enterprising Giramondo Poets series: an impressive first collection. Her spare, elegiac poems, including the remarkable ‘Solitaire’, originally published in the pages of ABR, and her Mallee Sequence, fantasies on a rural childhood, are unusually deft and inventive. Two new translations gave particular pleasure through the year: Aliki Barnstone’s The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy (W. W. Norton & Company) and Stratis Haviaris’s C.P. Cavafy: The Canon: The Original One Hundred and Fifty-Four Poems (Harvard University Press). Both these collections – the latter, with the original Greek on facing pages – include poems (of passing assignations and low-life encounters) I hadn’t met before, and brought the old favourites freshly alive. The big book of the year, however, was undoubtedly The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (HarperCollins), by that master of biographical narrative, Richard Holmes.

Delia Falconer

My best reading moment this year was my shamefully late discovery of Henry Handel Richardson’s astonishing Fortunes of Richard Mahony in the new Penguin classics edition. Richardson’s stunning character study should rate as not just one of the great Australian books but one of the best of the twentieth century. Another reading highlight was Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, inexplicably omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist: while I found the dynamics of the marriage unconvincing, I was thrilled by O’Neill’s portrait of Chuck Ramkissoon, the suggestive layerings of his story, and his Banvillean prose. I was also hugely impressed and moved by Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (Hamish Hamilton), with its won-derful combination of intelligence, feeling and impeccable research. Other pleasures: Christopher Benfey’s A Summer of Hummingbirds (Penguin Press) a sinuous and insightful study of Emily Dickinson and her circle; and Robert Gray’s beautifully measured The Land I Came through Last (Giramondo).

Morag Fraser

It is odd, and oddly salutary, to have the fifties of one’s childhood revived with astringent affection instead of condescension or picket-fenced nostalgia. Yes, there was enviable and unfettered time and space then. Yes, a child could be lonely without benefit of counsellor. And yes, there was angst and international conflict enough to provide the distant thunder every child registers without the ambivalent balm of understanding. John Jenkins’s sustained poetic narrative Growing up with Mr Menzies (John Leonard Press) manages a double perspective: a transparent and guileless child’s view of an Australian world occasionally interrupted by the detached assessment of an era, given through the tone and actions of Robert Gordon Menzies.

It is the extraordinary, open-eyed detailing of childhood that makes this work so memorable. It takes a canny – and ambitious – novelist to produce a fictional epic about friendship and equality across race in America at the tumultuous time of the 1919 Boston police strike, and make it echo as an allegory for the era of Barack Obama. But Dennis Lehane has a knack of stretching genres and his reader’s expectations. In The Given Day (William Morrow) we have grand (as they’d say in Irish Boston) storytelling, teeming with characters (including Babe Ruth as a rather too mechanical narrative pivot), political in the way of E.L. Doctorow, and prescient. It is not a perfect novel. Lehane is still better at orchestrating violence (his Boston police strike is bravura stuff) and the dark intimacies that violence generates than in portraying the twists and turns of the mundane heart. But he is always surprising, always promising more – and providing it. Richard Sennett is one of those rare writer–sociologists who wrestles gainfully with fundamentals we have almost forgotten how to name. In The Craftsman (Allen Lane), he articulates the anxieties we all feel about the worth of our work, and the meaning of the stuff with which we surround ourselves. He looks comprehensively at the way in which human beings over time have found dignity, beauty and fulfilment in the work of their hands and minds. He’s no Luddite, no sentimentalist, and he’s not proposing that we all go down to the basement and turn wood. But he does ask, with historical insight and ethical finesse, that we look again at what the world can gain when men and women cultivate the necessary patience and humility, and take the time to hone a craft, whether it be the making of a tone-perfect flute, or the practice of laser surgery.

Anna Goldsworthy

I was struck by Chloe Hooper’s essays in The Monthly on the death of Cameron Doomadgee, the subsequent inquest and the fall-out. In The Tall Man, Hooper tells this story in more breadth. It is a rigorous and unsettling book, and a work of luminous empathy. In The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, valiantly takes on a century of music. Writing about music is rumoured to be impossible, but Ross has figured out how to do it. Reading his evocation of Wozzeck is almost as exciting as listening to it: a terrific book to introduce you to the repertoire, or send you back to it.

Fiona Gruber

One of the most intriguing books to have been reprinted recently is The Night Climbers of Cambridge (The Oleander Press). First published in 1937, it is an account of a clandestine group of students who set themselves the nocturnal task of climbing all the ancient university and town buildings and, with very primitive camera equipment, recording their exploits. An early example of ‘buildering’ (urban climbing), it is heartening to read of subversive aerial acts from long ago, as young men pitted themselves against drainpipes, tottering pinnacles and the police. One went on to climb Mount Everest. The author, ‘Whipplesnaith’, was actually Noel Howard Symington, and he features in many of the photographs. The launch of Full Dress Publishing earlier this year is a welcome addition for collectors and students of Australian plays. The first volumes feature two playwrights, Lally Katz, with The Black Swan of Trespass, The Eisteddfod and Smashed, and Ross Mueller’s Construction of the Human Heart.

Richard Holmes

Xinran’s China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation (Chatto & Windus) is based on her extraordinary in-depth interviews with a dozen unlikely survivors of the Cultural Revolution (The Policeman, The Acrobat, The Lantern Maker, etc.). This brilliant work of oral history – a sort of Chinese Studs Terkel – gives a riveting glimpse of everyday life behind Mao’s Bamboo Curtain, and subtly reflects on the politics of memory and what may be yet to come. Jill Roe’s Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography (Fourth Estate) is a long-awaited and splendidly breezy blockbuster biography of the indefatigable, self-inventing and campaigning author of My Brilliant Career, who wowed Sydney and Melbourne, but also stirred up London, Chicago and the wartime Balkans, while spawning an astonishing array of other literary pseudonyms including M. Seednuts, Captain Bligh, Brent of Bin Bin and William Blake. Ann Moyal’s Koala: A Historical Biography (CSIRO Publishing) is a witty, miniature gem of a book by the distinguished first president of the Independent Scholars’ Association of Australia, who somehow gives us a compressed history of the entire country as seen from tree-top, leaf-nibbling level. Barry Pearce’s Sidney Nolan (Art Gallery of New South Wales) offers a superb collection of essays and stunning illustrations covering the whole of Nolan’s career, based on the 2007–08 retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Nicholas Jose

Last year may have been the bad one, but I read J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (Text) in March this year, in a hotel room in Chengdu where the television news was blocked to prevent us seeing what was happening in nearby Tibet. This teasing probe of authorship and authority, superstructure and underbelly, provided a suitable distraction. I was pleased to discover John Watson’s Montale: A Biographical Anthology (Puncher & Wattmann), an odd, obsessive verse response to the great Italian poet. It is always interesting to see how well Montale adapts to translation and other kinds of homage. And I fell easily into the warm, satiny prose of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a dark post-9/11 novel – the last for a while? – of innocence lost, double-dealing and, superbly, cricket among immigrants to the heart of New York.

Beverley Kingston

It was pleasing to see John Hirst’s Convict Society and Its Enemies (1983) and The Strange Birth of Colonial Demo-cracy (1988) reissued as Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony by Black Inc. earlier this year. Hirst’s argument about the nature of convict society and its impact on the development of democracy in New South Wales is too subtle for the reprobates who still thrive north of the Murray, but we need this view from the south.

James Ley

I have spent more than ten years recommending David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Abacus) to anyone who would listen. I reread it, for the unhappiest of reasons, in the wake of his death in September. It is, I assert (and not for the last time), a truly great book: brilliant, funny and sad. The Great Cham of Literature turns 300 next year and Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is an excellent contemporary life, the perfect complement to Boswell’s classic biography. I also enjoyed Stefan Collini’s Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (OUP), a collection of witty and learned essays on some of the most notable critics and public intellectuals of the twentieth century, and an example of literary journalism at its very best. The fiction début of the year was Nam Le’s The Boat, a remarkable short story collection by a highly talented and versatile young writer. 

Patrick McCaughey

Ann Galbally has followed up on her classic biography of Charles Conder with the charmingly written A Remarkable Friendship: Vincent van Gogh and John Peter Russell (Miegunyah), sympathetically blending illustrious and obscure lives, never making too great a claim for the relationship. Pity about the clunky design and unremarkable title. Sophie Cunningham’s Bird (Text) ranges far and wide, pursuing the double quest of a daughter for her lost mother and the mother’s egotistical search for spiritual peace. Comic and salutary by turn, this complex, refractory novel deserved a Man Booker nomination. Two books of poetry claim the last spot: Peter Steele’s new and selected White Knight with Beebox (John Leonard Press) and Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (Carcanet) show two old hands at their best and brightest.

Brian McFarlane

God of Speed (Allen & Unwin), Luke Davies’ ingenious evocation of Howard Hughes’s reflections on his career as billionaire, film-maker and bedroom warrior, confirms him as perhaps the most exciting of recent Australian novelists. His drugs-fuelled love story, Candy (1997), had established him as a potent and stylish risk-taker; God of Speed is even more of a tour de force. Hermione Lee’s biography, Edith Wharton (Chatto & Windus), is so immaculately researched and written that it is unlikely anyone will dare tackle the subject again for a long time. Terence Dooley’s collection of the letters of his mother-in-law, Penelope Fitzgerald, So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (Fourth Estate), not only offers an engaging picture of a whole woman but sends us back to those witty, poignant and minimalist novels such as The Bookshop (1978) and Offshore (1979). And Jeffrey Richards’s Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds (Continuum) persuasively locates political and more widely cultural significance in a century of epic cinema.

Peter Pierce

Back to his best form with The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), American Alan Furst is the finest writer of historical thrillers around. His terrain is Europe before and during World War II, revealed as treacherous, paranoid, violent, but not bereft of hope. While Furst is a solidly established niche taste, expatriate Australian David Francis’s thriller, Stray Dog Winter (Allen & Unwin), while only his second novel, is a bold bid for an international market. Set in Russia in 1984, a time of perilous political transition, and in an Australia where treachery also flourishes, if on a domestic scale, this is one of the best Australian novels of the year. Philip Mead’s Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry (Australian Scholarly Publishing) is the literary critical work of the decade. The ambitions of its subtitle are realised with incisiveness in detail, flair and command in traversing its grand subject.

Dorothy Porter

Andrew McMillan’s Strict Rules: The Blackfella Whitefella Tour, a timely, revelatory account of Midnight Oil’s tour of remote Aboriginal communities in Central and Northern Australia, was reprinted by Niblock Publishing, ten years after its original publication. It is an indelible read about a rock band on a mission, but also about where whitefellas, with the best intentions, can’t go, and what they can’t know. Peter Garrett emerges from the narrative as an austere man of enviable integrity and determination. Janet Frame published very little poetry in her lifetime. Four years after her death, Wilkins Farago has published a new and compelling collection of her poems, The Goose Bath. The book itself is beautiful to hold and to read. Even though many of the poems are profoundly private and unsettling, there is still the numinous sense of aliveness that illuminates all of Frame’s work.

Angus Trumble

This year I was moved by The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial, by James Q. Whitman (Yale University Press), which shows that the modern standard of proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ originally offered comfort and protection not to the accused, but to judges and juries terrified of being held eternally accountable for reaching the wrong verdict. Australians in Italy: Contemporary Lives and Impressions, edited by Bill Kent et al. (Monash University ePress), is wholly absorbing, especially Cynthia Troup’s ‘“Unevenly Buried”: A Personal Topography of Rome’, an essay of rare beauty. William H. Sherman’s Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania Press) tells the remarkable story of the ‘manicule’, the disembodied hand with an immensely elongated index finger which, from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, with astonishing consistency, generations of thoughtful English readers used to mark important passages in their copies of books and manuscripts. Its direct descendant hovers eerily over your computer screen.

Geordie Williamson

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland has copped a lot of flak since it arrived, earlier this year, bathed in the adulatory glow of James Wood’s New Yorker review. Most recently, Zadie Smith suggested that, while the novel’s brand of lyrical realism is perfect of its kind, Netherland announces the exhaustion of a tradition begun by Balzac and Flaubert. She may well be correct on the latter point; she is surely right on the former. Locally, it has been a year of brilliant water. The third volume of Steve Carroll’s suburban epic, The Time We Have Taken (HarperCollins), deservedly won the Miles Franklin Award, while, in The Good Parents (Vintage), the estimable Joan London spun her narrative from some shimmering, deliquescent stuff. Giramondo had an annus mirabilis with Robert Gray’s singular memoir The Land I Came through Last and Evelyn Juer’s collective one, House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann. And Fremantle Press did us all a service by reissuing Elizabeth Jolley’s early gem, The Newspaper of Claremont Street.

It’s midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
       The all-pervading dark of space,
       But not meant for the world of men.
                    It’s not what we forget
But what was never known we most regret
Discovery of. Checking one last cassette
Among my old unlabelled discards, few
Of which reward the playing, I find you.

What if Kenneth Myer, not Sir John Kerr, had been Australia’s governor-general in 1975? There would still have been storms in Canberra, but no intervention, no Dismissal. Readers of Sue Ebury’s fascinating biography of Myer (1921–92) may be tempted to play the ‘what if’ game, speculating on how Gough Whitlam might have used a full second term as prime minister.

When Graeme Base’s first picture book, My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch, was published in 1983, his exuberant illustrations and rollicking text produced a frisson. However, it was the incomparable ‘alphabet’ book Animalia (1986) that really launched Base’s career as a picture-book author–illustrator, and made him a publishing phenomenon in both Australia and the United States. In celebration of twenty-five years of Graeme Base picture books, his publisher, Penguin, has produced a glossy retrospective look at his work. Written by Julie Watts, a former editor and publisher at Penguin Books, The Art of Graeme Base is lavishly illustrated and engagingly written. The first chapter documents Base’s idyllic childhood in Britain and his migration to Australia with his family. The second charts his early adult life as a struggling graphic designer, aspiring rock star and budding illustrator. These chapters introduce the many talents, enthusiasms, influences and mentors that have shaped the Graeme Base ‘brand’. The next twelve chapters are devoted to in-depth revelations about the evolution and production of each of Base’s twelve books, including his most recent title, Enigma (2008). Many chapters also have a ‘Beyond the Book’ section, which explores the other formats that the indefatigable Base has ventured into as spin-offs from his books: television series, board books, dioramas, exhibitions and stage plays.

In an age when cricketing biographies predominantly lionise one-dimensional and vacuous individuals, this is a pleasurable reminder of an earlier era when even test players had regular jobs and a better sense of balance about life’s priorities.

Dreamland is the first foray into crime fiction of British-born writer Tom Gilling. His earlier novels, The Sooterkin (2000) and Miles McGinty (2001), were historically themed. His closest brush with the world of crime was Bagman, the posthumous memoir of the corrupt Queensland cop Jack Herbert, co-authored in 2004.

The premise of Dreamland is encouraging. Sydney journalist Nick Carmody meets up with playboy Danny Grogan, an old St Dominic’s schoolmate, at the wake of a fellow student, an apparent suicide. Carmody, a scholarship boy from Maroubra, had formed ‘an alliance of outsiders’ at school with Grogan, the son of a billionaire Sydney developer, the chairman-for-life of Grogan Constructions. Life at St Dominic’s, named after the patron saint of juvenile delinquents, was governed not by ‘the immorality of privilege’ but by its ‘amorality’, Carmody observes while catching up with Grogan Jr at his ominously named nightclub, The Crypt.

Barry Oakley, in his brief introduction to Families: Modern Australian Short Stories, tells us that the quality he was seeking in the fiction was ‘vitality’. This seems a rather broad filter: surely all good writing must possess vitality if it is going to hold the reader’s attention? Notwithstanding, many of the stories here are good, even excellent.

Although some of the less well-known writers offer compelling stories, the best-known ones have, on the whole, produced the most accomplished narratives. David Malouf’s ‘At Schindler’s’ is moving. It concerns a pre-pubescent boy’s realisation that his father is dead (after a long time of regarding him as missing in action) and the accept- ance of his mother’s sexual relationship with a young American soldier. Until then, the boy has thought of the American as a friend. As a rites-of-passage story, it subverts the usual narrative of trauma that a child might suffer on seeing his parent having sex. Tim Winton’s devastating story ‘Family’ is about two damaged adult brothers with a terrible history of hatred and rivalry, who meet accidentally in the surf. The younger one, whose point of view prevails, is publicly humiliated by his failure at Australian Rules and has returned to his home town seeking self- understanding and possible solace with his brother’s wife and children. Although the consequences are tragic, this is a wonderful examination of masculinity and family conflict.

Strange Museums is a strange book, a kind of fugue whose first theme is introduced by the poem ‘Tortures’ by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. It is a lament of evasion, uncertainty, the reservoir of pain that is the body and the inability to escape. It is enlarged da capo with the author’s discovery of a plaque commemorating the day in 1942 when Jews were rounded up and shot in the town of Piatrk w Trybunalski.

It is the tale of a most unusual journey made through Poland by performance artist and writer Fiona McGregor from May to July 2006. With A A Wojak, her performance partner and former lover, the journey is focused around an international action art festival where the two women, as senVoodoo, perform their confronting work, Arterial. It involves fear and shock, with the pain and risk endured by the artists calculated to take them to the edge. Even in description, Arterial draws a gasp.

There are no lions to whelp in the street any more,
and conversely
the Council by-laws forbid
the keeping of the pigs and chickens, goats and cattle
whose prodigious multiplications
could serve as an adequate metaphor
and there are only so many burgeoning plants
you can squeeze into a one-by-three-metre courtyard
but the possums have come back,

Everyone seems to be writing about ‘light’ at the moment. It is currently an all-purpose metaphor, the intangible symbol for all intangibles: mental, physical and emotional. With Brook Emery, it is far more precise. The ‘Uncommon Light’ of Emery’s title poem comes from St Augustine, and ideas of ‘common’ and ‘uncommon’ light recur throughout the poems, but are re-defined, flipped, turned and re-examined throughout this thoughtful and sustained book.

Uncommon Light (Five Islands Press, $21.95 pb, 72 pp) returns to the terrain of Emery’s first two collections, and dug my fingers in the sand (2000) and Misplaced Heart (2003). In this new book, he explores different ways of seeing the natural world, particularly the sea, personal relationships, and the impersonal, political world of strangers’ suffering. The poems are suffused with learning, intelligence and a deep humility which eschews flashy effects or poses. The voice is intimate and interior, with a concentration on the ‘I’ which is in no way self-indulgent. The poems highlight a difference between seeing and ‘conceiving’, but, accurate or not, the act of seeing is active: ‘an instrumental eye and instrumental heart rejoicing.’

John Jenkins (especially in his collaborations with Ken Bolton) is normally thought of as an ‘experimental’ poet, but in Growing up with Mr Menzies he is on more traditional ground. Born in 1949 in Melbourne, Jenkins has created the fictional character Felix Hayes, who was also born in 1949 in Melbourne. In a series of poems, he traces Felix’s life from birth through to early adolescence. Rather neatly, this period of his life fits with the so-called ‘Menzies era’; Robert Menzies returned to power in 1949 and left it (voluntarily) in 1966. It is thus the parallel story of two characters, one large and looming, the other small but getting bigger.

It was a bright and bold idea of Graham Freudenberg to write a book on Winston Churchill and his long links with Australian political and military life. Though Churchill didn’t visit Australia – ‘wise man’, some said – he was a strong or even decisive influence at several turning points in our history and indeed our mythology.

Churchill exerted influence here long before 1940, when he became Britain’s prime minister. He sparred with Alfred Deakin in London in 1907; he was the political mastermind behind the Gallipoli landing in World War I; and in 1921 he helped to throttle the renewal of the nineteen-year-old Anglo-Japanese naval alliance. In the 1920s he delayed, for valid financial and strategic reasons, the creation at Singapore of a naval base intended to be Australia’s front-line defence against Japan in the next world war. He was a lonely giant in defying Hitler in that terrible year of 1940; and in the following years he clashed with Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, on vital strategic questions.

Becoming a resurrectionist, a digger-up of dead bodies, was not a conscious career choice for me. Yet, along with two colleagues, I find myself accused of just that. We occupy this position because we have recently edited and published two previously unpublished works by Sir Walter Scott: The Siege of Malta and Bizarro (Edinburgh University Press, edited by J.H. Alexander, Judy King and Graham Tulloch, £45 hb). The appearance of our edition provoked a storm in a tea- cup in Britain, beginning with the Scotsman’s weekend edition, Scotland on Sunday, and spreading from there to the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Times. The storm died down quickly, but the issues remain.

John Reed would have relished it. He could have stood in Times Square in mid-October and watched as the neon newsflash chronicled the fall of capitalism as we know it. And felt the tremor. The difference now is that the ripple effect of seismic events spreads almost instantly. As Wall Street gyrated, banks in Iceland collapsed, and British police departments and local councils faced billion-dollar losses because their investments in Iceland had suddenly gone sour. British bobbies investing in Icelandic banks? Why on earth? That’s a wisdom-in-hindsight question, of course, but wisdom has been running so far behind delusion for decades that one wants to ask it anyway. Thomas Friedman began his New York Times column for October 19 by asking, ‘Who Knew? Who knew that Iceland was just a hedge fund with glaciers? Who knew?’ His repetitions underscored the absurd face of the financial tragedy. The implications of the question – who is responsible? – reverberated around the world.

I was in midtown New York on the day US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s first rescue attempt stuttered. People stood outside the News Corp. Building, necks craned to catch the latest. In this brusque city, strangers turned to me and started lengthy, distracted conversations. ‘This is gonna have an impact on the election,’ one astute analyst confided.

For the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008, I was the professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. This is an annual appointment, open across the range of disciplines that lend themselves to the study of Australia, so that my predecessor, Jim Fox, was a member of the department of anthropology, and my successor, Iain Davidson, is now working in the department of archaeology. I joined a large and vigorous department of history, which has about fifty members.

Some months before I left, the head of department asked me to prepare a course guide for my first semester of teaching. To help me, he sent a copy of one of his own recent course guides. It was quite adequate: the lecture programme, reading list and assessment procedures were all set out. But to anyone teaching in an Australian university it looked decidedly scant, the sort of handout that might have passed muster twenty years ago, before university learning and teaching committees began to insist that generic skills and key learning outcomes be specified for all subjects.

Vale Jacob Rosenberg (1922 – 2008)

The presence of octogenarians and even nonagenarians on publishers’ lists is one phenomenon of the age. Sybille Bedford gave us her exotic memoir, Quicksands (2005), in her ninety-fourth year. P.D. James, aged eighty-eight, has just published another novel, The Private Patient.

The Melbourne writer Jacob Rosenberg, who died on October 30, was not quite that old, but in some ways he seemed as old as the accursed century that he wrote about so memorably. Rosenberg was born in Poland in 1922. During World War II he was confined in the Lodz Ghetto, then transported to Auschwitz. In 1948 he emigrated to Australia with his wife, Esther.

The ‘publish or perish’ mantra is familiar to all academics and postgraduate researchers. Arts of Publication is aimed at these readers. The text emerged from a 2004 symposium on academic publishing, and sheds considerable light on this fascinating and frustrating field.

In the foreword, John Byron declares that an important challenge facing scholarly writers is to ‘ensure that their work gets out there in forms that are likely to have a detectable im-pact on their peers’ and also appeal to a ‘wider readership’. The various contributors (most of whom are academics) explain how this can be achieved. They refer to issues such as online- and self-publishing, writing for journals, and converting a doctoral thesis into a book.

The Trip is what happens when Ancient Greek mythology is mixed with Australian history. In a breezy 175 pages, George Papaellinas provides a rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey. He also revisits various highlights (and lowlights) from our country’s past. The result is an amusing and highly idiosyncratic read.

Papaellinas’s novel is narrated by the god Odysseus, or ‘Oddy’, as he is commonly known. In the opening pages, Oddy is ‘an old guy’ who is working ‘in the retirement village up the road from the pub’. He would rather spend time at the pub, but is instead participating in the ‘Work For the Dole Scheme’ set up by ‘John-John Howard’. Mr Howard is the ‘terribly conservative’ and ‘puritanical’ prime minister of Australia (called ‘Arfstraya’) who is ‘outraged’ at the idea that senior citizens such as Oddy might be living off the public purse.

The elderly Oddy admits that his most energetic activities nowadays include ‘drinking beer all day’ and ‘rolling the oldies over in their beds’. However, he does admit to having made Forrest Gump-style appearances in various famous historical moments. We read about Oddy cooking ‘kebab sangers’ at Gallipoli, having a drink with the ‘corrupt coppers’ Burke and Wills, and working as a jockey for his ‘big brown mate’, Phar Lap. Oddy also reminds readers that he is a ‘wog’ and a ‘migrant’, but that his ‘story is a very Arfstrayan one. It’s full of winners and losers, insiders and outsiders.’

Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? focuses on the unsolved disappearance of the eponymous figure. Hean was an environmental activist who vanished in 1972 while flying to Canberra to campaign against the destruction of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder, which was to be flooded for a hydro-electric scheme. The text is written by documentary film-maker Scott Millwood, who ‘offered a $100,000 reward for information that would lead to an answer to the mystery’.

‘I like sad girls,’ confesses the creepy narrator of ‘His Blue Period’, the story by Deborah Robertson that opens the latest anthology of short fiction from Black Inc. It is never entirely clear what form this liking took. The narrator’s intentions were undoubtedly sexual, but not just that. What he seemed to desire most of all was the story of each girl’s sadness – the telling of her particular tale of woe, ‘the full, heavy, sad, sweet works’ which blossomed (at least in his mind) like a magnolia. And how did he elicit such revelation? Simply by asking each of his melancholy companions about her childhood; it is there, he supposes, that true sorrow first takes root. Robertson’s story is sinisterly opaque, not least because the tables are eventually turned on the predatory narrator (the past tense of his opening confession is surely significant in that respect). Things start to fall apart after his brief encounter (a late-night quickie) with a woman who boldly describes her childhood as ‘lots of laughs’. This entanglement precipitates such a crisis of confidence in him that he suddenly has the urge to redecorate his yuppie apartment: ‘I wanted to go downstairs and take the car from the garage and drive out of the city to the suburbs, and in the unfamiliar streets I wanted to find a Bunnings.’ There is a deft comic touch here, but the dominant note is indeed a blue one, suggesting a vast metropolis of inexplicable sorrow.

Richard Holmes’s aim in this remarkable book is to set aside the notion that ‘Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity’, replacing it with the notion of wonder, uniting once mutually exclusive terms, so that ‘there is Romantic science in the same sense that there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons’.

What Coleridge, in 1819, called the ‘second scientific revolution’ grew out of the Enlightenment rationalism of the eighteenth century, inspired by discoveries in astronomy and chemistry but subsequently transforming it by ‘bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work … driven by a common ideal of personal commitment to discovery’. The emergence of the notion of passionately disinterested science, independent of political ideology or religious doctrine, and of the linking of scientific genius to poetic inspiration is seen by Holmes as challenging fundamentally the terms of the first scientific revolution led by Newton, Locke and Descartes, as well as the long-established authority of London’s Royal Society and Paris’s Académie des Sciences.

Less revolutionary than Women’s Liberation, the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) has been challenging the Australian system from the inside for more than thirty years. Social scientist Marian Sawer details WEL’s foundation, achievements and legacy, while situating it within the global women’s movement. A profusion of facts, figures, photographs and quotations are available for those interested in digging up the roots of feminist history. On the other hand, those seeking vibrant depictions of Australia’s second-wave feminist pioneers and their achievements will come away disappointed. To be fair, WEL’s collectivist and pragmatic nature is not amenable to a focus on charismatic leaders or radical action; however, Sawer’s chosen format has jumbled together information, with little standing out from the throng.

In the introduction to her Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), Angela Carter considers the contrary nature of the fairy-tale form. Born of a lively oral tradition, fairy tales are not beholden to veracity, and Carter celebrates the complete lack of desire for verisimilitude in Andersen, Grimm and Perrault: ‘Once upon a time is both utterly precise and absolutely mysterious: there was a time and no time.’ Fairy tales do not beg the reader to suspend their disbelief, they baldly expect us to see the thing for what it is: a tale, a lie. It is all in the telling: which parts of the story the narrator wants to illuminate; which parts she wants to subvert or leave out completely. Carter writes of the modern preoccupation with individualising art, our cultural faith ‘in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original’, but fairy tales are not like that. They eschew permanent ownership and the responsibility that implies.

It requires enormous skill for a contemporary writer to draw upon this folk tradition without overprotecting the reader, or showering them in bombastic metaphoric language, or turning to give an ironic wink every few pages just to make sure they are in on the jape. Margo Lanagan understands the genre. Her control and her confidence with language and literary allusions are mesmerising.

Bright comedians quickly learn that to explain a joke is to deprive it of its humour. If the gag doesn’t make an audience laugh without a laboured punchline, a good performer will swiftly modify her delivery for greater effect.

Perhaps Kate Morton should have kept this advice in mind as she wrote The Forgotten Garden. The narrative view-point changes between each chapter, allowing successive generations of Mount-rachet women to guide us through their respective eras. Readers are given an atmospheric sense of Victorian London and Edwardian Cornwall, of Brisbane in the 1970s and later in the new millennium. Yet there is a sense of tedious inevitability to the plot, due to the narrator’s incessant need to signal the narrative parallels. The author lays everything out for the reader neatly and clearly, leaving little space for suspense or interpretation.

In May 1965 the Victorian police raided a nondescript terrace house in East Melbourne. They were tracking illegal abortionists. Two doctors, one an outgoing social figure, bold and brassy, the other a quiet, studious man, were performing abortions on the premises. They had refused to pay protection money, and probably the raid was inevitable. The police rampaged about, taking files and notes, and eventually found three young and very groggy women who were clearly recovering from anaesthetic. The quick-thinking women claimed to be recovering from pelvic examinations, but the police were not fooled, and the women were rushed off to the Royal Women’s Hospital where a doctor probed them and their photographs were taken, legs apart. While the women were enduring this undignified end to their surgery, the doctors too were in trouble. With good lawyers, their hearings were adjourned, but they returned to their old work, a little more quietly, but still performing abortions.

The Racket: How Abortion Became Legal in Australia is really a twofold story: of the women who endured the abortions, and the doctors, criminals and police protectors who colluded to provide them. In times when medical abortion is relatively affordable and available, if not necessarily legal in some states, it is important to recall times when women were forced to seek out illegal abortions and thus be criminalised themselves. Some women learned to abort themselves; others turned to women for help, including friends, neighbours and local midwives. Many located willing doctors, some of whom would perform an abortion (often without anaesthetic) for a hefty fee. A medical abortion did not necessarily mean increased safety, cleanliness or better treatment: it was simply one way around a problem pregnancy. Women knew the risks of illegal abortion – from sepsis to haemorrhage, even death – but for those unable to endure pregnancy the risks were worth it. Women were, quite simply, prepared to die.

Peter Bishop’s book on bridges is the latest in the Objekt series published by Reaktion. It joins other books on the factory, the aircraft, the motorcycle, the dam and the school. The series focuses on the last hundred years, although Bishop traces the story of the bridge back to the early nineteenth century. Bridge is not, however, a straightforward linear history. Instead, it seeks to examine ‘the bridge (bridging and bridge-ness), along with the cultural practices – from the civic to the military, architectural to engineering, artistic, poetic and philosophical – that have circulated through it over the past two hundred years, from the onset of modernity to the dawn of the new millennium’. The result is an interesting and accessible, though necessarily selective, account of bridges and their cultural significance.

After the obligatory theoretical introduction in which Bishop claims to adhere to a ‘broadly communication and cultural studies perspective’ (he is an associate professor in the School of Communications, Information and New Media at the University of South Australia), Bridge becomes more compelling as it deals with case studies from around the world. Bishop discusses an impressive range of examples from the apparently inconsequential but divisive Burt Creek Bridge, fifty kilometres north of Alice Springs, to ‘super-spans’ such as the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, which, at 1991 metres, is the world’s longest suspension bridge.

There are traces of a constant, oscillating motion of conscience in Sandy Fitts’s poetry. References to the burden of ‘history’ pit the poems, with ‘history’ standing for everything we need to address in the present, through the power of eloquence, but also in fear that such words are not enough. From the opening, prize-winning poem, ‘Waiting for Goya’, to the closing images of ‘Blue Mop’, the act of poetry emerges and is scrutinised for what it might do in the world:

 our figures leaning      toward each other

    to exchange a few uncertain words

about the mop-    utility-   aesthetics-

Wars, inquisitions and human horror confront the poet, but is poetry sufficient, can ‘poetic diction’ ever really carry the gravitas of change and amelioration in the world?

Another word which emerges again and again in the poems is ‘theory’. It is an odd, slippery word here, often used to mean something like the random thoughts of the poet figure (‘Theories on a Bicycle’), sometimes seeming to signify false consciousness, as in the lines from the prose poem ‘Củ Chi Tunnels’:

We live in a simulacra now, said Baudrillard, there’s no real          experience

left. Though stayed home to say it. Noisy clown, he refused to        test his theory

on an active battleground.

'MODERN TIMES constantly challenges the reader to consider the nature of modernity and of modernism and its structure.’ Virginia Spate’s lucid preface to the volume articulates why this handsomely illustrated and well-researched book is such a ground-breaking history of Australian modernism. It acts as a companion volume to Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art Design and Architecture 1917–1967 (2007), which was an anthology of primary source documents including diaries, letters, talks and manifestos. These revealed Australia’s engagement with international modernist trends and the role of interior and fashion design in developing modernist principles. These developments occurred despite the Australian conservative government’s opposition to them, particularly when it came to the area of fine arts practice. Modern Times is aimed at a broader readership than its predecessor and is connected with a touring exhibition on show at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum until 15 February 2009. The book includes twenty-five articles written by academics, artists and curators from a range of different disciplines, including visual art, design, architecture, animation, fashion, popular culture, film and photography. These articles are divided into five themes that cover abstraction, the body, the city, space age, and electric signs and spectacles.

A conceptually sophisticated introduction by curator Ann Stephen, architectural historian Philip Goad and art historian Andrew McNamara sets up the framework for this collection. It argues that Australia must be seen as a ‘theatre of representations’. Modernist ideas, it suggests, impacted upon the making of diverse forms across a range of media that crossed specific discipline boundaries. This argument challenges the previous accounts of Australian modernism, which tended to stress a ‘formalist, insular approach’. The introduction also opposes the previous ‘mimetic and imitative accounts’ that stressed the ‘parochial’ relationship between the metropolitan centres of London, Paris and New York on the one hand, and Australia on the other. Previous accounts also failed to acknowledge the complex and contradictory nature of Australian modernism that emerges in Modern Times. Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting (1962) for example, was notable when it was first published because it emphasised the significance of Australian painting during an era in which the focus was upon modernist art produced within the metropolitan centres of New York and London. However, Smith’s historical narrative is limited to the fine arts practice produced by (in the main) male settler Australian artists.

and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,

and from every crime bullets are born

which will one day find

the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry

speak of dreams and leaves

and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.

Come and see

the blood in the streets.

Come and see the blood

in the streets!

So wrote Pablo Neruda, of the Spanish Civil War (‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’, 1947). These words could apply in any place where children are made to suffer and thus to hate. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Where the Streets Had a Name is a book whose pages resonate with these themes, unflinchingly; remarkable because hers is a book written for children and about children – those living in the West Bank.

William Kostakis

Jackie French explores the impact of World War I on both the home- and battlefronts in her extensively researched and earnestly written A Rose for the ANZAC Boys (Harper-Collins), which finds three young girls ditching the irrelevant deportment classes of an English boarding school to start a canteen in France for wounded soldiers. Barry Jonsberg’s Ironbark (Allen & Unwin), an uplifting read about facing inner demons and family, sees a sixteen-year-old city boy with Intermittent Explosive Disorder sentenced to a place worse than prison: his grandfather’s shack in rural Tasmania. On the ‘make-things-go-boom’ action side of the young adult spectrum, Jack Heath’s Money Run (Pan Macmillan), with its perfect mix of humour, suspense and attention to character, proves Heath’s expertise defies his age.

Maya Linden

Set in Lismore, Joanne Horniman’s My Candlelight Novel (Allen & Unwin) is the fictional autobiography of a young single mother that presents authentic reflections on maternity and sisterhood through evocative lyrical prose. Horniman’s elegant literary style, refreshingly, does not condescend to young readers. Internationally, All in the Family: Stories That Hit Home (A&C Black), edited by Tony Bradman, anthologises the world’s pre-eminent children’s authors. Like Horniman’s novel, this specially commissioned collection is an uplifting exploration of contemporary family life in all its multiplicities. Trust Me (Ford Street Publishing), edited by Paul Collins, is another notable compilation. This teaser traces diverse genres, from thriller to romance, showcasing top Australian writers such as Meme McDonald and Justin D’Ath, in a format perfect for the short attention span of early teens.