These writer’s scribblings, handsomely reproduced, cover two distinct periods in Murray Bail’s life: London from 1970 to 1974; and Sydney from 1988 to 2003. The notebooks from the London period, which represent roughly two-thirds of this book, were previously published as Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook (1989). While readers may find some interest in comparing the formative and the mature writer, the older Bail’s reflections on ageing and death represent the most consistently penetrating writing in Notebooks.

For all its cleverness and flashes of mordant wit, Notebooks meanders. True, Bail offers perceptive snapshots of both landscapes and people, such as this: ‘Outside the station a man playing the accordion with a photograph propped at his feet of himself as a young man in a crouching stance, EX-MIDDLEWEIGHT BOXER.’ True, he quotes the famous and powerful to good effect: ‘Mitterand, asked what quality is most required in a leader: “Indifference”.’ But not all of Bail’s comments and asides are gem-like. And I did not always want to be privy to his self-analysis.

None of this reflects negatively on Murray Bail as a writer. By definition, these pages are unformed, private and discursive, and the overall impact of the book cannot be measured against Bail’s fine body of published fiction. Indeed, some fans of Bail will appreciate seeing his themes and preoccupations ‘in the raw’. Other readers will be attracted to Notebooks precisely because it offers a glimpse (no more) of the genesis of creativity as well as a glimpse (no more) of the ways that novelists straddle, then cross, the line between observation and speculation. While I question whether the opportunity to view Bail’s writerly scaffolding adds to the experience of reading Eucalyptus (1998) or Holden’s Performance (1987), individual readers may react differently and more positively to Notebooks.

Alan Moorehead, journalist and historian, was a celebrity in his day, but has not had the lasting reputation of others of his generation, such as George Johnston, perhaps because he never wrote a great novel. (Would Johnston still be famous had he not written My Brother Jack?) Furthermore, Moorehead’s historical works, while widely read, were not rated highly by academic historians, and thus have not entered the historical canon. Nevertheless, many of his books are currently in print.

The name of Sir John Wilton would be unknown to the vast majority of the Australian public, to the defence community as a whole, and even, I suspect, to many of those now in the army. Such is the transitory nature of military prestige. David Horner’s biographical study seeks to correct this, and to explain the centrality of Wilton’s career to the development of Australian defence policy and operational deployment in the postwar period. This is more than a biography: while Wilton the man is not neglected, the emphasis is rather more on Wilton the professional, steadily climbing through the officer ranks in a series of appointments that culminated in his tenure as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from 1966 to 1970.

Wilton’s career mirrored the fortunes and misfortunes of the Australian Army. After graduating from Duntroon, where he survived the infamous ‘fourth class training’ system, he was faced with unemployment, since the much-reduced army was not able to offer positions to all of the small number of graduates. He accepted a commission in the British Army and from 1931 to 1939 served in India and Burma. Returning to Australia, he saw service during World War II in the Middle East and New Guinea, in the Korean War, and in senior staff appointments in Washington and Canberra. For the last period of his career, Wilton operated at the level of ‘strategic command’, a rare experience for a senior Australian officer. The various stages of his career, prior to becoming Chief of the General Staff in 1962, gave him the opportunities to work with coalition partners, to work in integrated, multinational, high-level planning bodies, and increasingly to interact with political leaders in Australia and beyond. In all these roles, Wilton’s insistence on a professional approach saw him rise steadily in the military hierarchy, at a time when the military and political problems confronting the country were becoming more and more complex. His rise, however, was not necessarily inevitable. Wilton did not have the usual networks within the army that characterised most of those who rose to prominence during World War II. His long period in the British Army meant that he had not developed those close personal and professional relationships within the small regular army and the Citizen Military Forces that were so important. Wilton rose to the top not so much because of influential patrons but because his outstanding qualities could not be overlooked.

Those qualities served Australia well in the trying circumstances of the Vietnam War. In its combination of political and military difficulties, this was an unprecedented challenge. Drawing on his long association with South-East Asia, in particular in the planning section of SEATO, Wilton was convinced of the rightness of the cause, but he was also aware of the sensitive political dimensions of the commitment to Vietnam, especially at the domestic level. A realist, he understood that Australia’s military presence would not affect the overall outcome, and he was concerned to ensure that Australian casualties were kept to a minimum and that inter-service rivalries were kept within manageable bounds.

Those rivalries, and the attendant inefficiencies that they caused, were another of Wilton’s long-standing preoccupations. He was a determined proponent of ‘jointery’, and sought to have the five departments that together made up defence amalgamated into one. That was a truly herculean aspiration that he did not achieve before retiring in 1970, but he made significant progress towards it. These battles, and many others within the bureaucratic structure of the Services and Defence, are described in detail in Horner’s book, which skilfully balances the role of individuals, and Wilton in particular, with the broader political and military imperatives.

Wilton the man emerges from these pages as reserved and shy, impatient with the increasingly heavy social demands made on him, and unable and unwilling to engage in small talk. The overriding impression one gains is of a man of immense conscientiousness and unswerving probity, a professional who lived for the army, in the best sense of that expression. Yet what is also evident is that Wilton’s happy marriage played an important part in his life, as did his family, even when, over the issue of National Service, it might have ruptured relations with several of his children. No headliner or gregarious back-slapper, Wilton’s quiet, dedicated approach was founded on an intense pride in the Army on the one hand, and a deep sense of service on the other.

David Horner brings to this study an unrivalled knowledge of the period. His research is grounded in a mastery of the archival and other sources (has any other historian now writing interviewed so many of the players?). He has struck exactly the right note between the biographical approach and a consideration of the wider issues and settings. He has done Wilton proud, and in the process has given us a fascinating, authoritative and penetrating insight into the workings of defence at the highest levels.

Steven Lang has a fine sense of the Australian vernacular and creates believable characters. This novel forges a new genre (maybe it’s just new to me): the environmental thriller. Protagonist Kelvin was a street kid and rent-boy in Kings Cross. Now twenty-one and beautiful, he fetches up, after years of aimless drifting and casual work in remote locations, in his home town of Eden, which he fled eight years before. He joins the labourers setting up a commercial pine plantation after the area has been clear-felled, but then becomes involved with a group of hippies who live on a commune – ‘the farm’. Here he falls easily into a sexual relationship with Jessica, an environmental activist and writer. She is older, educated and politically sophisticated, in a way that engages Kelvin’s imagination but compels him to hide his past.

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism manages to be simultaneously comprehensive yet skewed, innovative yet inert, and pluralistic yet doctrinaire. As a theoretically sophisticated rewriting of modern art from 1900 to 2003, it is a major achievement and will surely be of central importance in the field for years to come. Its authors are among the leading art historians of their generation and have often worked together. They are perhaps best known for their ground-breaking work in the pages of October, the US journal of art and theory, which was founded by Rosalind Krauss, among others. They have also often collaborated on other projects such as Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), by Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. It is probably not overstating the case to say that together Hal Foster, Krauss, Bois and Benjamin Buchloh have had as significant an impact on the discipline of art history as Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich had earlier in the century.

That said, Art Since 1900 reads like an epitaph. In April, the Observer newspaper reported Foster’s revealing comment that the group’s current students ‘want to do dissertations on moments in which we were participants’, a point that Bois endorses: ‘For our students, we are part of the historical record.’ There is some irony in this. All four, but particularly Buchloh, are staunch advocates of the idea of the avant-garde as resistance and critique. Today, however, the authors of Art Since 1900 have long since established themselves as eminent members of the (academic) establishment. Perhaps this accounts for the book’s occasional tone of professorial hauteur. The brief suggestions for further reading that appear at the end of each chapter, for instance, are dominated by their own works, especially in the earlier chapters, and by the writings of their students, collaborators and friends. Foster et al. do not even pretend to be objective or inclusive, which of course may not necessarily be a bad thing.

When Richard Florida, the peripatetic celebrity academic from George Mason University, was in Australia to promote The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), he described Sydney as one of a dynamic new generation of cities that is attracting global talent. The following year, as a guest of the Melbourne Fashion Festival, he included Melbourne with Helsinki, Stockholm and Minneapolis–St Paul as models of creative and inclusive societies. On a later visit to New Zealand, he observed that the Lord of the Rings movies catalysed a new technology and entertainment industry for Wellington, earning it the reputation as a creative city. Is there a pattern here?

As explained in his bestseller, Florida’s ‘creative class’ is made up of ‘technological creatives’ in research and development, ‘cultural creatives’ in film, music, entertainment and architecture, and people in ‘knowledge jobs’ such as law, finance and health care. Enticed by the three Ts of economic development – technology, talent, and tolerance – the creative class builds community spirit, attracts new investment and drives local economies. Predictably, his ideas had immediate appeal. How could Americans, especially those who see themselves as members of the creative class, not like a man who says that diversity, tolerance and a vibrant cultural life are the ingredients of the country’s economic success? How could they dismiss someone who claims that how we live matters – that vibrant street life, outdoor recreation and a music scene are important in choosing a place to live?

It took twenty-five years for the first comprehensive feminist appraisal of the Chamberlain case to be published. This speaks volumes about the thrall in which Australia was held by the Chamberlain story. Adrian Howe writes: ‘It is as if the saga so overwhelmed the national psyche that it defied feminists, left-wing activists and most trained thinkers of any ilk to make sense of it.’ She does not exclude herself from this judgment. In fact, she describes her return to Lindy Chamberlain’s story and her collation of the other feminist critiques of the case as an act of expiation, making belated amends for having succumbed to the dominant media line and thus become complicit in the resulting miscarriage of justice.

Utilising the language and methodology of Foucault, Howe assembles a spirited critique of the Chamberlain trial by bringing together academic feminist perspectives with the voices of the general population who wrote to Lindy Chamberlain expressing their solidarity. The unlikely juxtaposition is legitimate according to Foucault, the distinction between ‘buried’ specialist knowledge and other knowledge that is disqualified as ‘non-conceptual’ being unsustainable. Rather, the knowledge of these subjugated ‘counter-publics’ should be united in insurrection against authorised knowledge. The practical implications of this approach are not always easy to swallow. Gut feeling accords greater recognition to the letters of support from men and women with experience of dingoes or midwifery, say, over those who simply state they ‘have always known’ Lindy Chamberlain was innocent, or those who identify her as a latter-day Job. Discordant minority opinions from the archive are excluded despite sharing a common history and repository with letters favourable to the Chamberlains. They are identified as belonging to the dominant narrative and therefore unworthy of further airing. Given that virtually no previous examination of the archive exists, the sense of being molly-coddled is difficult to shake.

When my Scottish in-laws asked about traditional Australian Christmas fare, I barely felt confident to answer for my own family, let alone for the nation. I started putting the question to friends here: what, traditionally, is eaten on Christmas day at your place? The regular response was a look of perplexity. This was invariably followed by a story of change: we used to have turkey, but in recent years it’s been salmon in the Weber; when I was a child we had a roast, a pudding, all the works, but now we have chicken salad; my partner is Lebanese/Vietnamese/Polish, and I’ve adopted his family’s traditions. The one constant seems to be change, and no doubt this is a – possibly the – defining feature of ‘Australian cuisine’. In other countries, the word ‘traditionally’ does not induce such uncertainty.

There is a scene in Kate Lyons’s The Corner of Your Eye in which the narrator, Lucy, watches her daughter, Flo, being comforted over the death of a bird by their kind but bumbling friend, Archie. As Archie soothes Flo, hugging her and talking to her about what they will do next, Lucy stands apart, not knowing how to act. She feels negligent and guilty: ‘I felt like a pretend mother,’ she says. ‘A bloodless cut out.’

The travails of motherhood and the emotional pressures it creates are defining themes in these two new novels by young women writers. There are some striking similarities between the novels’ protagonists. Elizabeth, the central character in Tegan Bennett Daylight’s Safety, shares with Lucy a reluctance to engage with others, even those closest to her. But it is the differences between them that are significant. While both novels examine maternal experiences, they draw on very different ideas about femininity and the expectations created by intimacy.

These are both second novels by previously successful authors. Each has an atmospheric sense of place and a dominant female figure. In Beyond the Break, it is the flamboyant and dangerous Irene. In Out of Place, the matriarch Eve, a postwar Italian migrant, keeps her family together through her insistence upon the traditions and the healing rituals of the old world, including especially the cooking.

Sandra Hall is an experienced journalist and film critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. Beyond the Break is a Sydney book, full of seductive and changing images of city and surf. The surf-side suburbs – Coogee, Cronulla, and Maroubra – are captured at a time when the most one could fear was a shark attack or a rip that would take the swimmer out ‘beyond the break’; never a race riot. Against the hedonistic beachside lifestyle of the 1950s and 1960s, the novel traces the dynamic relationship between two teenage girls, Annie and Steph; their too-close friendship, their rivalry and the accompanying tensions. Moving to the forthright 1980s, it traces their matings and partings, and their occasional professional successes. Meanwhile, contrasting episodes set in a more vigorous and competitive New York offer a fresh perspective on the Sydney scene.

When I was seven, a teenage orphan called Katherine came to stay with us for the summer holidays. Katherine had short red hair, freckles and brown eyes. She loved play-fighting and running, and hated wearing dresses and skirts. The only skirt I ever saw her wear was the navy blue one that was part of her school uniform. When the school holidays ended, Katherine stayed and became our foster sister. The big back room became her bedroom. She decorated the sloping roof over her single bed with posters that promoted jobs in the police force: the armed offenders squad, the dog squad and the youth protection squad. When she turned fourteen, my parents bought Katherine some shelves and a desk. The latter was beautiful; I would have liked it myself. Katherine liked it, too. She spent most of her birthday on her own in the bedroom. I looked through the keyhole to see what she was doing. Katherine had her head on the desk and was crying. Mum said it was because she was happy. My foster sister left school when she was sixteen and found work in the taxation department. In her spare time, she trained for the police-force entrance tests. At nineteen, she got in and left home for good.

Katherine unsettled me by taking my place as the oldest child. Foster children are not bound to their parents or siblings by any of the conventional markers of family: blood or name or law. They are insiders and outsiders, siblings and strangers. Foster children are tragic figures: their parents have abandoned them through death or, more often, through incompetence of one traumatic kind or another. Unlike an adopted child or one created through either donor sperm or donor eggs or both, the foster child never truly belongs to her family. Her foreign origins remain transparent.

Okay, I’ll take up Kevin Murray’s challenge in his poem ‘Freelance’ – that the reviewer is ‘a rogue knight / circling other men’s dragons’, though, like Max Richards, I reject Walter Benjamin’s Romantic formulation of criticism as a ‘fulfilment / of the artwork’. Each of these dragons has some fine points; all are modest in their own ways and illustrate Shane McCauley’s gloss of Robert Frost, ‘having the grace / to say that perhaps poetry doesn’t matter very much’. But in different ways, all three focus intently on the compelling significance of the minute, nuanced moments and details as a means of exploring big questions about ageing/mortality; the revelation and casualness of nature; the meaningfulness of history at both personal and public levels; and the functions and significance of art and writing. All are in various ways influenced by both the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge (particularly the ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ aspect) as well as the modernist urban scepticism of T.S. Eliot. These are mannerly dragons. None will scorch the gentil reader-knight. Nor is there a hint of halitosis.

Glassmaker, Shane McCauley’s fifth collection, is a beautiful beast: richly and elegantly designed, on heavy, cream, semi-gloss paper, suggesting a close connection with its own production processes and with the poems’ preoccupation with painting, calligraphy and translation. The title poem isn’t the only one to hold out a belief in crafting to make order out of chaos: ‘unravelling from a night’s black throat.’ Andrew Gilchrist’s cover illustration has a window panel in which the universe is glimpsed in a swelling glass bubble.

John Hirst is a throwback. I don’t mean in his political views, but in his sense of his duty as an historian. He belongs to a tradition which, in this country, goes back to the 1870s and 1880s, when the Australian colonies began to feel the influence of German ideas about the right relationship between the humanities and the state. Today it is a tradition increasingly hard to maintain. Under this rubric, both historians and public servants are meant to offer critical and constructive argument about present events and the destiny of the nation. Henry Parkes was an historian of sorts, and he was happy to spend government money on the underpinnings of historical scholarship in Australia. The Historical Records of New South Wales was one obvious result, and that effort, in itself, involved close cooperation between bureaucrats and scholars. Alfred Deakin was likewise a man of considerable scholarship (and more sophisticated than Parkes), whose reading shaped his ideas about national destiny, and who nourished a similar outlook at the bureaucratic level.

It is a great and powerful tradition. A generation later, that great Australian historian Keith Hancock clearly thought of his historical work as a form of public service. He always wrote as if he knew that his words, including trenchant criticism, would help to shape national policy – that they would be useful to men and women in power. In the 1940s and 1950s he helped to found the Australian National University as an intellectual powerhouse tied to government. ‘Nugget’ Coombs might stand as an equivalent public servant – far-seeing and hard-hitting, and valued by both sides of politics. Especially during those two great periods of nation-building, the late nineteenth century and the decades following World War II, historians and public servants had considerable respect for each other’s work, acknowledging similar responsibilities. But now, at a time when the word ‘nation’ is on everybody’s lips – national identity, national maturity, national medal tally – intelligent thought about the nation is much more lightly valued. Historians are abused for writing critically about the Australian past, and public servants don’t even pretend to large-minded independent thought.

Tracing both the frisson between city and outback realities and the impact of politics on the music scene, Singing Australian is not only about the intersections between folk and country music and their appropriations from a raft of other genres; it is also an insightful chronicle of Australia’s struggle for identity as a post-colonial society, the search for nationhood through song and an expansive panorama of this country’s social history.

Roaming through diverse music-making locations that include coffee bars, outback stations, ‘sticky-carpet pubs’, churches, festivals such as Woodford, Tamworth, Port Fairy, WOMADelaide and the Gympie muster, the author pushes the definitional frames of folk and country music as he parades fascinating snippets of information. ‘Folk as we have seen, is a flexible term,’ he says; whether or not the reader agrees, the arguments are plausible and thought-provoking. This capacity to invoke curiosity is one of the book’s great strengths.

A magnet on my fridge has a cartoon image of a Tasmanian Devil and reads: ‘Send Tassie more Tourists – the last ones were delicious!’ David Owen and David Pemberton’s book shows how flawed the stereotype of the Devil as an insatiable, aggressive animal is. They reveal the Devil’s complex nature in this well-researched and detailed work, which is the first on the Devil to be published.

Berlin, 1948; the Iron Curtain has slammed shut, bisecting a city still pitted and scarred from the calamities of World War II; the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the subsequent Allied airlift are imminent. Around these tectonic moments in history and politics, first-time novelist Greg Flynn sets his thriller, The Berlin Cross.

The novel opens with Captain Beauchamp, a member of the British Royal Military Police stationed in Berlin, examining the tortured corpse of Friedrich Kessler, an atomic scientist working for the US government. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, New York detective John Docker is employed by a mysterious antiques dealer to purchase the Berlin Cross, which is, according to legend, a fragment of the cross on which Christ was crucified. From these starting points, Flynn fashions a story about politics, espionage, atomic secrets, black marketeering and a brace of beautiful women. The novel sounds like an enticing mix of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929) and Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (1998).

Conservative columnist Mark Steyn has mocked modern progressives for having no enemies, just friends whose grievances are yet to be accommodated. The decision as to whether grievances are best accommodated or confronted is one safely made only if informed by a deep understanding of the particular discontent. Brendon O’Connor (Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Public Policy at Griffith University) and Martin Griffiths (Associate Professor of International Relations at the same institution) have edited a collection of thoughtful and lively essays aimed at increasing our understanding of the assortment of grievances, anxieties and criticisms known as anti-Americanism. This timely volume, comprising a dozen contributions by respected scholars from the US, Britain and Australia, largely succeeds in this aim.

In their comprehensive introduction, itself a tightly wrought summation of the chapters that follow, O’Connor and Griffiths characterise anti-Americanism as ‘a disposition or sensibility rather than a substantive set of beliefs or arguments’, endorsing earlier diagnoses of a phenomenon so divorced from rationality as to be pathological: ‘a sort of allergic reaction to America as a whole.’

Debates about the balance between life and work are currently running hot in the media, government and the publishing world. Don Edgar, foundation director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, delivers a passionately argued and engagingly written analysis of the various issues currently affecting work culture and the family. He focuses on women juggling motherhood and work, the masculine workplace culture that considers family issues none of its concern, future directions for children’s learning and development, the challenges posed by our ageing population and the continuing erosion of traditional full-time work.

Those young people of today, with their iPods and mobile phones, their tight-knit friendship groups and brief romances, their social activism and distrust of big-P Politics, their yearning for independence and need to conform … what’s really going on in their minds? Not much that sets them apart from the rest of mainstream Australia, or so it appears from Rebecca Huntley’s The World According to Y, where the author’s 18-to-25-year-old interviewees register with few exceptions as cheerful, pragmatic and keen to get on with their lives, however uncertain the future.

Jan Senbergs’ art is not easy to like. Sombre, brutal, austere in colour, it nevertheless represents one of the most sustained meditations on the industrial landscape in Australian art. Patrick McCaughey, well-known gallery director, academic and critic, has written about the artist and his work in a way that deliberately blurs biography, autobiography and visual critique. The result is an engaging and unusually meticulous account of the evolution of an artistic career, documenting the emergence of ‘Senbergs country’ as a force in the Australian aesthetic imagination.

This handsome, bountifully illustrated book is strictly chronological in structure, a sober and unexpected approach in this age of theorisation. The reader is taken through Senbergs’ life’s work in two- to nine-year portions, each chapter driven on by a new artistic project, life as a series of art events. The book fits into a neglected tradition of writing the art and life of the artist as one, a genre in which art and life give meaning to each other, interwoven as aspects of the one journey (or ‘voyage’ to use McCaughey’s metaphor in the book’s title). McCaughey is upfront about his biographical intentions to ‘uncover the remarkable self that animates and broods’ within these works, and his conviction that art springs directly from the artist’s experience.

Canberra-based Dorothy Johnston is an accomplished writer who has twice been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. Her talent for spare, casually evocative prose and slyly complex characters shines through in this surprisingly elegant novel about a single mother who turns to prostitution to earn a living.

‘Trick lit’ is a popular, almost tired, genre at the moment, but The House at Number 10 manages to transcend the clichés (and purple prose). Johnston strips prostitution of its seedy glamour, including observations about uneven bedposts and the Tracy Chapman CD playing in the kitchen alongside the inevitable naked body parts and sweating clients. Sophie, a former public servant and recent housewife, is small and plain, and wears a sarong as her uniform.

Pham Thi Hoai, now a resident of Berlin, writes about her Vietnamese homeland with a sardonic yet affectionate eye. While not overtly political, these short stories explore every-day life in a restricted society that is opening slowly and selectively. Sunday Menu is full of observations that, without preaching, flag the complexities of modern, modernising Vietnam. For example, regarding a group of locals touting for tourist dollars on a beach, the narrator in ‘The Toll of the Sea’ writes: ‘My heart fell heavy as I saw in each of them a former teacher now looking for a better income.’ Such asides represent a challenging form of dissent. As translator Ton That Quynh Du writes in his helpfully contextual afterword,: ‘her detractors have charged her with holding an “excessively pessimistic view” of Vietnam, of abusing the “sacred mission of a writer” and even of “salacious writing”.’

This is an auspicious time to reissue a book by a Cypriot-Australian in a bilingual edition. Awareness of Cyprus in Australia, and of Australia in Cyprus, is at unprecedented levels following the spectacular performance in the 2006 Australian Open Tennis Championship of both Marcos Baghdatis and his colourful crowd of supporters from the Cypriot subset of the Melbourne Greek community. Bilingual (even trilingual) editions are the hallmark of Owl Publishing, but this fifteenth volume in its ‘Writing the Greek Diaspora’ series represents a new departure in its inclusion of high-resolution artwork: section four of the collection comprises sixteen photomontages, mostly statuesque combinations of objects and body parts.

The photomonteur and poet Peter Lyssiotis has been experimenting with the conflation of words and images since the early 1980s, and has specialised in limited-edition livres d’ artiste since 1992. One of these, A Gardener at Midnight: Travels in the Holy Land (2004), currently features in the well-publicised exhibition ‘Lost and Found: The Adventures of Two Artists in the State Library of Victoria’. A deluxe elephant folio in a limited edition of ten copies, the book recasts the journey described in a nineteenth-century travelogue held by the State Library as a journey across Iraq in the wake of Operation ‘Shock and Awe’.

What role should international law play in the domestic legal sphere? The author of the Institutes of Justinian stated that ‘[e]very community governed by laws and customs uses partly its own law, partly laws common to all mankind’. Nevertheless, a certain view propounds that international law is an unstable or subversive intrusion into the processes of democratic sovereignty and the pedigree of national law. Such a stance, while persistent, denies social fact; the reach of international legal regulation is unprecedented and national bureaucracies increasingly operate beyond state boundaries. Such is the reality of the ‘Fluid State’ which, the editors of this volume suggest, will alter orthodox understandings of the interrelationship between international and national law.

The subject matter that this absorbing collection traverses is vast, but the editors have generally succeeded in assembling a dynamic range of introductory and advanced material, much of which can be accessed by a reader arriving fresh to the issues. Certain subjects demand deeper treatment than they receive here: the role of international law in constitutional interpretation, the subject of heated dispute in recent High Court cases, receives surprisingly little attention. But the contributions to this volume, from scholars of politics, public law and international law, reflect innovative and critical attempts to move beyond traditional analysis.

The title of Nick Riemer’s first volume of poems is taken from a piece of graffiti in a Sydney church, and the poems therein are aptly replete with a peripatetic, contemporary metaphysical wit. The volume as a whole has a sharp, cultivated air of philosophical enquiry, tending to nihilism, and is shot through with the poet’s continuous testing of the limits of language.

The opening poem, ‘The Fence’, establishes the volume’s philosophical tone: ‘The fence is there, still the same as itself, it is a line, / it is the fence_________ / _________ it blocks things.’ Riemer’s poems enact a type of descriptive phenomenology, and are often found at the nexus where ‘being’ and language meet (and where they miss each other). Of the fence he surmises, ‘The most I can say is: there’s a separation of some sort somewhere’, reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s response to Descartes (not ‘I think therefore I am’ but rather, ‘there is a thinker’). Elsewhere, Riemer addresses Maurice Merleau-Ponty directly.

Poetic imagery, similes and metaphors are the staple of lyric poetry (which Riemer’s poetry is, despite its philosophical and linguistic escapades), and this is where the poems are at their most potent. Riemer’s often exhilarating and innovative images are achieved with ease and lucidity: ‘Day climbs off its stilts. Paragraphs of light / hinge from the clouds, heavy birds swivel / overhead’ (‘Sunset: MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia’).

Riemer’s use of repetition and chiasmus appear informed by Gertrude Stein’s poetics: ‘I ask the fence and the fence asks me’ (‘The Fence’); ‘the park is a platform, the park is like a platform on which / everything is set’ (‘Park André Citroën in winter’); ‘Observations aren’t observations’ (‘Unrecorded’). In ‘Rain Bethlehem’, a strong sonnet sequence dealing with the biblical and numinous, the poet laments the insubstantiality of a world preoccupied with representation: ‘Nothing here deserves a name: everything is / surface and byproduct’ (‘What is in the world’).

While his lyrical gift is undoubtedly substantial, Riemer seems intent on continually and explicitly sabotaging himself, out of a sense of resistance, perhaps, to lyrical sublimation. ‘The Polystyrene Oblong’, for example, concludes with a direct request that it be dismissed by the reader: ‘Don’t think you’re / getting more for less in this poem: it’s a poem about an oblong of polystyrene. Now forget about it.’ On occasions this works, but other times it proves distracting.

Going on the volume’s epigraph – the full text of the graffiti from which the volume’s title is derived (‘Roses are red, violets are blue / James Stinks and so does Chuck’) – one might expect it to contain a sophisticated sense of lyrical subversion, perhaps an exercise or two in dissonance; but while the poems here are definitely conceptually audacious, the musical jokes aren’t always equally so: ‘the fence’s white, light fight against the might of the night and / above it / the only bright, the bite of a height (shite, right?)’ (‘The Fence’). For me, this sheer irreverence bordered on nervousness, was tonally unnecessary and ultimately detracted; many can write irreverently, but few can use words as powerfully as Riemer does when he is tonally unselfconscious.

The title poem of Graham Miles’s début collection, ‘Phosphorescence’, is an enervated suburban lyric that opens with an arresting image of a mid-afternoon caffeine jolt: ‘Three o’clock and caffeine traps you / between sleep and waking, / pulls you back like a dog restrained / from the roadside forest of smells.’ The efficacy of this image depends on a keen sense of inversion – the jolting stimulant, caffeine, is re-envisaged as having a restraining, leash-like quality, associated with repressed sensorial experience.

Miles is a student of ancient Greek and Latin, and, like Riemer, of philosophy. ‘Circle and Line’, perhaps the centrepiece of the volume, is a seven-part homage to the fourth of Virgil’s Georgics, where Orpheus’s tortoise-shell lyre might have been restored to its original owner:

The tortoise-mothers come out

into the bob-cut bush by Lake Joondalup, to hide

the white globes of their offspring in the sand.

They dip deep under the air, periodic

as people dreaming, and see the limits

of their lives from above, like astronauts seeing

their blue sphere, its sky curved backwards.

These delightful lines reveal a keen sense of imagination applied by the poet to his own erudition. Miles’s preoccupation here with fecundity, characteristic of the volume as a whole (as in the poems ‘Mould Blooms’ and ‘Ultrasound’), is next undermined, but ultimately reinforced, in the third section of the poem, by the contrasting image of the cicada – as literal fecundity gives way to a sense of fecund lyricism, after Orpheus: ‘Over the turn and counterturn of seasons / The cicadas speak straight lines. Their uncurved poems / move forward restlessly. Their bodies / are age-shrivelled, film-winged, / wrapped around their metrics.’

Tonally, Miles is more phlegmatic than Riemer, as in ‘This Town’:

A riot here couldn’t start

would evaporate in too much space.

In the lavatorial whiteness of the shops

a sign proclaims a Last Days Sale,

and the train-line goes on to imply

that here is somewhere else to go.

The last squares of green

are untrodden as museums.

Though this description of suburban apathy is generally enjoyable, the third-last line rings somewhat familiar, and for mine, the final simile fails to cut it. As with most poets, it’s sometimes a matter of whether or not the reader takes to one’s idionsyncratic way of seeing: ‘The clean idea of a yacht is sailing / on the ad hoc river’ (‘Your Backyard Dogs’). Not all of the images come off, but that’s the nature of audacity. A little more restraint may have been in order at times, but many a fine first collection has been subject to the same criticism. The best poems here, in my opinion, linger over their images in order to describe them comprehensively, though Miles can at times be as effective in a glance. It is difficult to begrudge a poet who writes lines such as these from ‘Some Things the Body Knows’: ‘In the world of snakes to wake is urgency, / every movement desperate as an action-hero’s. / For half a year the amphetamine sun pours out of sky, / then half a year of recovery dreaming like stones.’

Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s Peeling Apples is a graceful, if comparatively conventional, collection, which has at its heart a rare sangfroid, and an acute sensitivity to experience. Hers is a more sober type of pyrotechnics; words and concepts here are never complicated for complexity’s sake. These poems reveal a finely honed knack for enjambment, and generally sport the cool tautness of control. ‘Assured’ is a term used rather loosely these days, but it is certainly and precisely applicable in this case.

Above all, a sense of composure permeates this volume. Time and again, the poems hinge on a moment of poise, a pause during the chaos of events. In ‘A Matter of Time’, a poignant, if unsentimental, deathbed scene, Morris-Suzuki explains: ‘I lay bland words / like balm, like healing leaves / over a gash in life itself.’ Brief lyrics such as ‘Solstice’ and ‘Migration’ evoke a sense of stillness, sustained throughout the volume, which is juxtaposed by their mutual, transient subjects (birds, the seasons). The images are precise and, whilst uncomplicated, never purely simple, either.

The poet remembers how, ‘On first seeing the Mediterranean’, ‘The sun on my lips / was warm as bread’. Many of the poems here deal with memory. ‘Photographs’ opens luminously: ‘The reckless sunlight has been trapped / in celluloid, / our smiles embalmed – / Do you remember that dress?’ (‘Photographs’). ‘In the Time of Drought’ concludes with a powerful, vivifying moment of reflection, characteristic of the volume as a whole: ‘I … / go to the door for a moment / to taste the coolness, / and see beyond the weightless fall of Earth // new worlds forming in the depths of space.’

After twenty years in the Tokyo police, Inspector Aoki knows the ‘beeping of the excrement detector in his brain was a definite warning that shit was coming down the freeway’. His declaration is indicative of this convoluted plot. Aoki, after seventeen months heading an excruciating investigation into the corrupt ‘Fatman’, a high-profile government official, discovers that his case has been irrevocably shut down. Quicker than you can shout ‘yakuza’, his journalist associate is murdered, his father dies of heart failure, his wife commits suicide and Aoki is placed under observation in a psychiatric hospital. Suspended from duty, he is sent to recover at the Kamakura Inn, an exclusive mountain retreat outside the city. But his sojourn is far from therapeutic, and Aoki is soon wrestling both the temptation of beautiful geisha and the danger of a bloodthirsty murderer running loose through the guest house.

Here we go again!

There are few certainties in this world, but newspapers can be relied on to conjure stories and brouhahas from a select group of cultural activities. Screen a movie to a class of undergraduates, or add pulp fiction to a curriculum, and The Australian – possibly even the prime minister – will be down on you like a ton of bricks. Should Opera Australia go into the red, all hell can be relied on to break loose. If Radio National has the audacity to cover both sides of a story, you can be sure it will pay a heavy price.

The Miles Franklin Award has long been good fodder, and has filled many a gaping column. And why? Perhaps because of its pre-eminence in the Australian literary culture, and because of the precise nature of Miles Franklin’s wishes in endowing the Award, which was first presented in 1957 to Patrick White’s Voss.

History has never been so much fun,’ says the blurb of one of the books reviewed below. Welcome to the twenty-first century. Work is fun. History is fun. Writing is fun. Writing history must therefore be really fun!

The English writer Terry Deary was the creator of the Horrible History series, which blatantly exploits the perceived unlimited capacity of most nine-year-olds to wallow in poo and spew. This model has been eagerly taken up by other imitators, and one of the strangest is Anna Clark’s Convicted! The Wonderful World of Kids, Crims and Other Convict Capers (Hardie Grant Egmont, $12.95 pb, 110 pp, 1920878602). Illustrated by Kate Cawley with varying success (the convicts certainly look stunted and grim but her captions are odd), this book’s type size and language suggest that it is intended as a text for children eight years and up.

After attaining a low-luminosity arts degree, I worked for a year as a handyman in my university’s Research School of Physical Sciences. This was in 1972, when the new particle accelerator was being installed in its massive concrete tower; its assembly made my humble handyman job one of the most intriguing and happy employments I have had. We bolted together the sandblasted steel pipes for the SF6 (sulphur hexafluoride) coolant, first larding their joints with gaskets of white gunk. In a lofty workshop dominated by the monstrous ex-Krupps steel mill (a German war reparation), we hefted the odd magnetron on chainblocks that our master-craftsmen might more conveniently prepare it for installation. We crawled into the cavernous interior of the accelerator’s ‘tank’ to grind at weld-burrs until the steel surface had no tiny irregularity to which the fourteen million volts intended for the apparatus could distractingly zap. To this smooth surface we then applied a silver paint until we stood, spattered angels encompassed by our weird reflective heaven. We watched the precision tubes being installed through the centre of this tank by lanky experts from Wisconsin, knowing how, within these conduits, the particles were to be accelerated by that impressive voltage toward targets the size of my thumbnail in collisions that would explain the universe finely.

The Sydney Morning Herald has been ‘Celebrating 175 Years’ all year. The words adorn every front page; the Herald ran a number of commemorative features to mark the actual anniversary on April 18; and The Big Picture: Diary of a Nation, consisting of essays by journalists and photographs from the Herald’s magnificent photographic library, has been published (see John Thompson’s review in the March issue).

Australia’s oldest surviving newspaper and its publisher, Fairfax, have also been making news. Many column inches have been expended covering the appointment of a new chief executive, David Kirk, and Herald editor, Alan Oakley. News reports have been supplemented by gossip, disquiet and even venom in various newspapers, online newsletters, and pubs. Will the British import Andrew Jaspan survive as editor of TheAge as he presides over falling circulations and morale? What of the apparently oversubscribed voluntary redundancy offer to the staffs of the Herald, the Sun-Herald and TheAge, a cost-cutting measure initiated at the same time as Fred Hilmer departed as CEO with a $6 million payout? What are we to make of the former political connections of Kirk (chief policy adviser to New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger), chairman Ron Walker (Liberal Party federal treasurer) and editorial director Mark Scott (Liberal Party staffer)? Did Walker, a friend of the late Kerry Packer, play a role in the Herald’s decision to refer to Julie Trethowan as Packer’s ‘close friend’? How were negotiations conducted for the Herald’s wrap-around Commonwealth Games feature on March 16, given Walker was also head of the Games organising committee?

ADB replies to Paul Brunton

Dear Editor,

Paul Brunton has written of the quotas used in the selection of subjects for inclusion in the Australian Dictionary of Biography in a review (ABR, February 2006) headed ‘Mysterious quotas’, and in a follow-up letter (ABR, April 2006).

The explanation of ‘quotas’ is straightforward. At the beginning of each new period (now a decade), the ADB is confronted by the task of selecting individuals for inclusion in the volumes for that period. Who is to choose them? Not the general editor, sitting at a desk in Canberra. Because Australia is a federation of states with separate identities, the ADB has always worked on the democratic principle that state working parties, comprising eminent scholars and representatives of occupational and interest groups, are best placed to identify the significant individuals from their state’s past. To the six state working parties have been added a Commonwealth Working Party, an Armed Services Working Party and, recently, an Indigenous Working Party. The working parties rely on their own professional expertise, consultation with community representatives, exhaustive combing of biographical and historical sources, and careful and lengthy committee evaluation to construct and refine their lists.

Mia Couto’s most recent novel (translated into English in 2004) begins with a ‘large organ on the loose’: a severed penis, like a ‘fleshy hyphen’, is discovered lying on a road in the Mozambican village of Tizangara. It seems that another UN soldier has exploded, for in a nearby tree is a telltale blue helmet. A delegation of Mozambican and UN officials descends on Tizangara, and an Italian, Massimo Risi, is left behind to find out why six UN soldiers have been “eclipsed” and who is responsible. The Last Flight of the Flamingo (first published in Portuguese as O ultimo voo do flamingo in 2000) is Couto’s most successful attempt yet to incorporate the animistic traditions of Mozambican culture into a European fictional framework. It is funny, mercilessly satirical and unmistakably African.

What works you did will be yourself when you
Have left the present, just as everything
The past passed to the present must become
A terrible unstoppable one blend
Of being there (the world) and not to be
(The Self). Grow old along with me, the best
Is bet to be – the worst (of course) lack(s) all
Conviction, as the poet mistranscribed,
Storming a grave to satisfy his pride.
They love me, all my words, despite how often
I made fools of them, betrayed them, begged
Forgiveness of them. They are like the million grubs
Which swarm around their Queen. I file them in
Wide boxes where they wait their Master’s Voice,
Accusing and defending. A letter plans
To burst in sullen flame, its heat conserved
By what was written once – but chiefly silence
Triumphs under missing banners – death
Will be the one unmentionable
Impossibility. What happened lives
Parenthetically and privately.

When is it morally defensible to take one’s own life? Whenever, might be the first response: it is, after all, one’s own life. While the church still regards it as a grave sin, attempted suicide is not a crime, though helping someone else to commit suicide is. Yet does not a desire to end one’s life at a time of one’s own choosing have to be weighed against the pain it might cause others? Is suicide not a statement to family and friends that whatever love, care and support they have given, it was not enough?

Gillian Bouras, who has written a book about her sister’s suicide, appears to find the act morally unjustifiable. ‘If ever any of you contemplates doing this, please spare a thought for your brothers,’ she says angrily to her sons on learning of her sister’s death. Bouras’s sister Jacqueline, known as Jacqui, died in a South Yarra flat on 18 December 1996, at the age of fifty, following a ‘meticulously planned’ drug overdose. Bouras, living in Greece with her Greek husband and three sons, received the news over the telephone from her father. This honest, disturbing book is an attempt by Bouras to come to terms with her sister’s death and with her own troubled relationship with her.

In 1978 the French weekly L’Express published an interview that sent a shockwave through the French collective conscience. The subject was Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the wartime Vichy government’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Having escaped at the end of the war to the safe haven of Franco’s Spain, he was now an octogenarian, enjoying some prestige as the official translator of the Caudillo’s speeches. Darquier had been condemned to death in absentia by the Liberation courts, but never extradited. He was not the only Nazi collaborator to have escaped punishment, but what most profoundly perturbed the readers of L’Express was that his virulent anti-Semitism was still completely intact, as was his refusal to believe that the Shoah was anything other than a Jewish fabrication. In the late 1970s France was at the beginning of the long process of self-examination and self-remembering whereby it would seek to come to terms with one of its history’s darkest periods. For Charles de Gaulle, whose presence had dominated so much of the two decades after World War II, the Vichy government was an illegality, and its leaders traitors. After de Gaulle’s death in 1970 began the slow and painful process of acknowledgment that the experience and behaviour of the French during the Occupation was more complex than the Gaullian vision, and much more shameful.

Vernon God Little (2003) was the striking first novel everyone said it was, and seemed to promise better things to come. D.B.C. Pierre had a preternatural way with language, even if it wasn’t always under his control. You could tolerate the sophomoric and tritely executed satire (America is full of fat, stupid, venal people; America is just a great big television show), as it seemed the flawed trying-out of someone who hadn’t found his way to the things he really wanted to write about.

In Ludmila’s Broken English, the splendours are almost all fled, leaving us with incomparable miseries. Pierre still hasn’t found a story worth telling, and he has taken a bath in the worst aspects of his prose style. Vernon God Little was very talented and very flawed; in Ludmila’s Broken English, you can still see the talent, but the book is so dreadful and so morally stupid that early on you stop giving a damn about wasted opportunities, mismanaged gifts and the like. You just want the thing to be over.

It’s before I got the wandering eye.
I daydream I’ve already left:
without her each morning I’d be able to wake,
stretch in bed-warmth, blink used to light, not lie
feigning sleep in case she cradles my back,
her lap flexing for my elbow to lift
to take her arm onto my chest. I keep still
until she shadow-dresses upon the wall.

Autobiography is based on a paradox. It is a generic representation of identity, but identity and genre appear to be antithetical. If we conventionally think of our identity as unique (singular, autonomous and self-made), how then can the presentation of that identity be generic? How, when narrating our lives, can we be both singular and understandable? Does narrating a life presuppose a way of writing (that is, a genre) that will make it recognisable as a story of a life? And how individual can we be, given that we are social animals? We live in families, form attachments and belong to institutions. How much is identity a case of identifying with others?

These questions call to mind the ‘relational turn’ in the literature on life writing in the last couple of decades, whereby selves are not seen as self-sufficient, autonomous and self-determined. Rather, selves exist in relation to others. Such thinking stems in large part from the work of feminist literary critics who critiqued the autonomous self as a patriarchal construct and argued that the female self (and therefore women’s autobiography) developed and operated in a relational way, taking into account the subjectivities of others. More recently, critics such as Nancy K. Miller and Paul John Eakin have argued for the intersubjective nature of subjectivity and auto-biography generally. Relational models of the self suggest that autobiography is a kind of transaction, a telling of others’ stories as much as one’s own.

Many older readers of ABR would remember Peter Russo – whether fondly or otherwise – for his newspaper columns (principally in the Melbourne Argus) from 1941, and for his ABC radio broadcasts, which continued until his death in 1985. As for younger readers: picture a journalist–commentator (his career defied easy description) who was as controversial in his day as any of our present ‘shock jocks’, but who actually knew what he was talking about. Leading politicians approached Russo not to curry favour with his audience but to understand matters within his areas of expertise: Asia and international affairs. Such expertise – including fluency in eight languages – made it difficult to ignore his contributions to public discourse which, as Prue Torney-Parlicki’s biography makes clear, were substantial. Until this biography (the first comprehensive study of the subject to be published), Russo risked being remembered not for what he said or did but, rather, for what others said about him.

For a while it seemed that the reign of the saga novel, a form once so vital for narrating and propagandising the Australian past, was over. The pugnacious Xavier Herbert was now a wandering shade; Colleen McCullough had removed herself to Norfolk Island; Eleanor Dark and ‘M. Barnard Eldershaw’ belonged to a literary history known to too few. The saga had ceded its cultural place to the television miniseries. That summation held until very recently. Billy’s Tree, Nicholas Kyriacos’s first novel (a creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts, although it appears too unguarded to have come from that treadmill), bravely seeks to reinstate not only the saga form but its language and its valuation of what ought to matter to Australians who are alert to the burdens of their history.

Having taken on that task, this novel is a kind of museum of the dozen great Australian moments that every child should know about. Breathtakingly bad as it was almost bound to be, the book may become a classic of a sentimental ilk. Its setting is the recent past, the last years of the twentieth century in Sydney, when diehards and desperates who supported the South Sydney Rugby League Club (‘the cardinal and myrtle’ its heraldic colours) saw a ninety-year life snuffed out by the evil media empire of News Ltd, then miraculously brought back to a faltering existence. The novel’s assorted characters take some of their bearings – particularly in respectful ancestor worship – from the story of the battlers’ club and such inner suburbs as Redfern that nurtured it.

Deep under the streets of Paris, the tunnels, chambers and galleries of the catacombs run in all directions, some of them filled with the skeletons of the dead who were displaced in the eighteenth century from the overflowing cemeteries of Paris and moved here, their bones stacked six feet high and six feet deep along the walls. During World War II, the chambers and tunnels were used by the French Resistance and also by the Nazis. These days, tourists queue peacefully to totter down the delicate, steep, spindly steps into the underworld darkness, nervously following the guides through what feels like miles of tunnels. The mystery of the dripping noise is solved when you come back up into the sunlight to find your clothes streaked with the dissolving lime of the underworld.

The US scares North Korea.’ If you are George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, you may be satisfied with this statement by former US diplomat Donald Gregg. It might signify the success of American policy towards North Korea, a country you consider to be a dangerous ‘rogue state’ that is developing nuclear weapons and exporting missile technology, and that is led by a repressive totalitarian régime. The only way to deal with such governments, you believe, is through threats, deterrence and, if necessary, military action to degrade offensive military capabilities or even to remove them from power. But what if this brings us to the brink of disaster? In this timely and important book, Roland Bleiker exposes this schoolyard philosophy for what it is: a dangerous and simplistic recipe that has brought North-East Asia to the brink of war too many times in recent years. Ever since the North Koreans announced in 2002 that they were withdrawing from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and were on the brink of developing a working nuclear capability other countries in the region have been justifiably alarmed.

Much critical historical interest in Edward John Eyre has centred on the apparently radical contradictions in his life. Known variously as ‘the enlightened defender of Aboriginal rights in Australia, but also as the reviled “butcher of Jamaica” in England and the Caribbean’, Eyre’s notorious career began in the late 1830s and included exploration and colonial administration in Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies, reaching both its apex and nadir while he was governor of Jamaica during 1864–65. Historians have puzzled over how a man who displayed a marked respect for indigenous people during the period from 1839 to 1845, as an Australian explorer, Resident Magistrate and later Protector of Aborigines at Moorunde, could have acted in such a barbarous way as governor of Jamaica after riots broke out in 1865. There have been several biographies and numerous piecemeal studies of Eyre’s colonial career. In Edward Eyre: Race and colonial governance, Julie Evans expands past approaches, attending to the play of power between London and the colonies (amply canvassed earlier in relation to the Morant Bay Jamaica rebellion by Catherine Hall, and extended here), the contradictory constructions of ‘race’ in colonial contexts (derived in part from the postcolonial critiques of Patrick Wolfe) and the distinctly different colonial cultures in which Eyre worked. She aims to confound and refigure the ‘common correlations between race, resistance and repression in the colonies’.

By definition, chiaroscuro is Italian for lightdark; in practice, it is a technique wielded by painters and graphic artists, whereby dynamic applications of highlight and shade are contrasted for dramatic impact. Along with Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Audrey Evans proves herself to be a master of chiaroscuro in her memoir, Many Lifetimes. One can see the hand of the artist as she sketches her truths in simple, yet striking, strokes; Evans writes with a raw honesty that turns a spotlight onto chosen moments in her life, and allows others to remain enveloped in darkness.

This technique is particularly effective in a work that admittedly suffers from the ‘vagaries of memory’. Although Many Lifetimes is generically linked to such works as Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) and Roberta Sykes’s Snake Cradle (1997), the narrative structure of Evans’s memoir deviates from those written by her forerunners. The unpredictably segmented nature of her narrative suggests a hurried or desperate attempt to record fleeting memories; it also alludes to the author’s cyclic revisitation and repression of these memories. The retrospective recording of events more than half a century old forces Evans to be imprecise at moments when one would find precision in Morgan or Sykes. Yet, like a true artist, Evans accepts that an impression will never be as sharp as the original. Thus, she accentuates the unreliable nature of memory by encapsulating her life story in a series of chronological, yet seemingly sporadic, episodes. The result is a staccato narrative, wherein Evans adeptly describes some highlights and shadows, and leaves readers with a satisfying illusion of a complete picture.

Arthur Tange joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1942, at a point in time when it was undergoing ‘a permanent revolution at once in the size, the calibre, the philosophy and the significance’ of what it was and what it did. Most Australians now forget, if they ever knew, just how limited the function and reach of federal government was in the first decades of the Commonwealth. As in so many areas of national life, World War II wrought a profound transformation in virtually all aspects of central government and public administration, and the young Tange was in at the beginning of the process. As Sir Arthur Tange, Secretary of External/Foreign Affairs and Defence successively from the 1950s to the late 1970s, he did more in turn to shape the formulation and execution of policy in these two areas than any other official, and many ministers, of his time.

I first met Sir Bruce Williams as a wise and wry voice in sceptical register at meetings of the Senate and its Finance Committee at the University of Sydney in the late 1990s. His service to these bodies followed a distinguished career as an academic, economist, university administrator and adviser to governments on policy formulation and implementation in higher education, science and technology. His is a public life that now extends over half a century and spans both Australia and the UK. The most prominent segment in Williams’s long and influential association with higher education in Australia is his time as vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney from 1967 to 1981, a period that he characterises as ‘discontent and disruption’: student and staff ‘revolt’, the protest movements against the Vietnam War and apartheid. It also saw the beginning to some modifications of the university’s hierarchical and gender structures.

In Making and Breaking Universities, Williams looks back on his life and times, charting, in a combination of auto-biography and memoir, observation and analysis, the major changes in higher education since World War II, changes which he notes appear to occur regularly at fifteen-year intervals. Sections are devoted to his experience of, and views on, the governance, organisation and finance of universities and to their relations with government. The last chapter asks the question of whether traditional universities, ‘autonomous spaces in which free inquiry and critical learning can flourish’, have a future in the time of globalisation and neo-liberal economies, of the commodification and commercialisation of higher education.

The annual series of lectures held at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography are a lively tradition on the city’s cultural calendar, and are noted for both their critical currency and diversity of voices. This collection of essays and images, selected from lectures and exhibitions held at CCP from 2000–4, continues the allied tradition of publications that record selected papers from the series. Its time-frame also marks Daniel Palmer’s energetic tenure as coordinator of the lectures, during which time the Centre played host to a wide range of critics, practitioners, curators and academics.

From the many lectures, forums, artists’ talks and conversations held at CCP in this five-year period, Palmer has selected six contributions for publication in Photogenic. This tight editing has resulted in a less expansive volume than its immediate predecessor, Value Added Goods: Essays on Contemporary Photography, Art and Ideas (2002), which featured the work of nineteen contributions from lectures held at CCP in 1996–99. It would be unfair, however, to judge Photogenic on whether its editorial selection accounts for the breadth of discussion across the lecture series, especially since the selection of texts is so conceptually elegant. Palmer has combined papers that engage with a common concern: the persistence of the real in relation to photography. ‘Each writer,’ he argues, ‘seems drawn to photography’s power to inspire belief in what is shown in front of the lens.’

This book consists of sixteen essays based on papers delivered at the symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities held in Hobart in 2004. The title of the book was the theme of the symposium. A conference must have a theme, of course, or no one would ever fund the participants, but individual speakers do not always address it, or they do so tangentially. We have all been at conferences where the relationship of the speaker’s paper to the theme is the same as that between the ugly sisters’ feet and Cinderella’s dancing slipper – a great deal of stretching and contorting to make the text fit the theme, and vice versa. This is why conference proceedings rarely make good books.

The editor starts off well in her introduction by enlarging on the theme: ‘What can we know of the past and how can we best represent it? Must the discipline of history make good the fallibility of memory or does the imaginative work of fiction do a better job of enlivening past experience than the stern empiricism of the historian?’

This crime novel is about as topical as it gets, starting with the killing of a Melbourne underworld figure. Tough yet tender Detective Rubens McCauley is framed for the hit. McCauley fights to save his life and restore his name to the former level of disrepute it once enjoyed. In the course of McCauley’s quest for the truth, he teams up with hottie Constable Cassie Withers. In the tradition of many crime stories, we wonder if they will connect in other ways. We are set up nicely for a sequel, and ‘Huzza!’ for that.

Henry has obviously done his research. One of the vicarious pleasures in reading a novel like this is to learn more about crime and its detection. Henry makes us feel like armchair sleuths. This in-depth knowledge is also integrated into a highly entertaining tale. However, some of the early parts of the novel lack the energy of the later ones. Raymond Chandler’s advice from 1943 about sexing up thrillers is just as pertinent today: ‘When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.’ Not all of the dialogue rings true, particularly that of the underworld thugs, who mostly appear to talk like middle-class bureaucrats. For example, Jimmy Favian, the president of the Vikings bikie club, asks one of his henchmen in anger: ‘And since when do you get off second-guessing my judgment?’ The questions posed by such a figure would be much more visceral and generally involve words of one syllable and four letters.

Henry knows the genre and knows how to write within it. Pity he doesn’t know a good proofreader. The numerous typos and misuses of semicolons don’t do justice to this promising crime writer.