My theme is the mixed and contentious business of reviewing: its influence, its limitations, its present condition in what we like to call our literary culture. I will largely confine my remarks to the literary pages of our newspapers and magazines. I don’t propose to comment on the learned journals – or criticism at monograph length issuing from the academy. (Not, sadly, that there is much of that kind of publishing in Australia these days.)

Nor, I hope, do I seem to disparage my colleagues in the editorial ranks. At the risk of sounding like a Qantas steward seeking our nervous attention before take-off: each magazine or newspaper, like each publishing house, has its own unique features that make it subtly different from all the others. Not every editor, for instance, enjoys total independence; the number of literary pages in our newspapers is often determined by the amount of advertising; not every editor is free to publish lengthy, discursive articles; some are required to publish a clutch of short, perky reviews.

But enough caveats!

Dennis Altman

This was a year of political books, symbolised by Thomas Keneally’s The Tyrant’s Novel (Doubleday), an allegory about the individual writer living under a brutal dictatorship, based upon Saddam’s Iraq, and framed by Australia’s treatment of refugees fleeing the very regimes against which we went to war. My own colleagues contributed two important books to Australian political debate: Robert Manne and David Corlett’s Quarterly Essay, Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference (Black Inc.); and Judith Brett’s Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class (CUP). Brett knows the importance of understanding those with whom we disagree, rather than just condemning them. From overseas, Colm Tóibin’s The Master (Picador) and Jasper Fforde’s new fantasy, Something Rotten (Hodder), did it, as they say, for me.

Neal Blewett

Perhaps it is the bleakness of the contemporary world, but history has dominated my reading. Two beautifully crafted and imaginative reconstructions of times and places, centuries and continents apart, have been the most memorable books I have read this year. They were Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers (Text), an empathetic and moving retelling of the encounter of two civilisations on the shores of Port Jackson at the end of the eighteenth century; and Lauro Martines’s April Blood (Jonathan Cape), which captures Florence of the high Renaissance and its capo, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the bloody retribution he exacted for the murder of his brother, Giuliano, in the cathedral of Florence on a Sunday morning in April 1478. But the present is inescapable. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (W.W. Norton & Co.) provides the most compelling narrative of any governmental commission in my lifetime.

Alison Broinowski

Tony Kevin’s A Certain Maritime Incident: The Sinking of SIEV X (Scribe) and Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (Penguin). It was a rare excitement, having waited for these two books, to find them so rewarding. Buruma and Margalit combine their knowledge of several cultures, and particularly religions, to explain the enmity of much of the world towards the US and its friends. Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers also invites the world’s hostility – especially the government’s dodgy behaviour, minutely investigated by Tony Kevin, during the SIEV X disaster. Ignorance and intolerance make for closed minds and closed societies everywhere, Occidentalism argues, and A Certain Maritime Incident shows that’s true of Australians.

Martin Duwell

Robert Adamson’s portrait of himself as a young man, Inside Out: An Autobiography (Text), is simultaneously luminous, sophisticated and problematic. It is full of lurid material about an early life spent in prisons and, later, in poetry. Then there are Peter Boyle’s The Museum of Space (UQP) and Judith Beveridge’s Wolf Notes (Giramondo). These are works of major poets in mid-career, each sounding completely distinctive but having points of connection in that both deal with the issue of the infinite expandability of consciousness and the minute experiences of life that anchor it. The centrepiece of Beveridge’s book is a daring inner biography of the life of the Buddha between leaving public life and enlightenment – brilliantly done.

Morag Fraser

Graeme Davison’s Car Wars: How the car won our hearts and conquered our cities (Allen & Unwin): you don’t have to be in thrall to the automobile to be enticed by Davison’s enthusiasm for his father’s ‘brand new [1950s] Chevrolet utility with the cream duco and wide chromium grille’. It is a canny historian’s hook, and Davison uses it to catch and keep the reader throughout this close-focused and subtle social history. The particular landscape is Melbourne, but the story is universal. Much heralded in Scotland, James Robertson is little known in Australia. The Fanatic (Fourth Estate) is an historical novel that illuminates present ills (fundamentalism, colonial rapacity, racial and ethnic conflict) by reanimating sources in the past. No romance, no costume flummery. Robertson, like his compatriot Ian Rankin, can stare human complexity in the face and sometimes see unexpected grace.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

The five stories in A.S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories (Chatto & Windus) about the human (and the inhuman) body encompass almost everything that the poetic and profoundly intellectual Byatt has ever been about, from the wartime monster in the forest, through the gruesome sculpture of Kali the Destroyer, to the woman who turns into stone – opal, carnelian, peridot and pearl all coming back to the questions her work has always asked: what is art? How do we know? Colm Tóibin asks the same questions in The Master (Picador). This fictional version of the life of Henry James could easily have been awful but is, instead, a breathtaking mix of emotional intelligence and precision engineering. Stephanie Alexander knows what art is; her revised and expanded edition of The Cook’s Companion (Lantern) is a third bigger again than the classic original and has, along with many other enticements, expanded chapters on cheese and chocolate. If you have never made Stephanie’s rabbit pie, you must do so before you die. And if you think $125 is a lot to pay for a cookbook, ask yourself how much it costs to go out for dinner.

Lisa Gorton

Robert Adamson’s Inside Out: An Autobiography (Text) combines his lyrical sense of the world with his ruthless pursuit of his own ends. His recklessness gives this autobiography the quality of suspense, as the reader waits for consequences to close in. It has car chases and prison stories to satisfy the armchair anarchist, but it stands out for Adamson’s descriptions of Sydney in the 1950s. Giramondo published two strong poetry collections: Anthony Lawrence’s The Sleep of the Learning Man and Judith Beveridge’s Wolf Notes, which imagines Siddhartha’s wanderings in India. It describes villages, strange moons and characters with a clarity and calm force that might have appealed to Judith Wright.

Bridget Griffen–Foley

Peter Conrad’s astute and elegant Orson Welles: The Stories of Hus Life (Faber) and Graeme Davison’s crisp and insightful social history, Car Wars (Allen & Unwin), gravitated to the top of my bedside table. But, in a year featuring sensational stories about commercial radio presenters, my favourite book was a yellowing, if not quite a classic, novel. Picked up for ninety–five cents, Edwin O’Connor’s The Oracle (Max Reinhardt, 1952) cleverly satirises the life of a New York radio ‘news commentator’, the forerunner of our talk-back hosts. The aptly named Christopher Usher pontificates on international affairs, advocates smaller government and finishes his broadcasts with heartwarming domestic items and nostalgic footnotes. On one occasion, pink and hairy, he communes with his public in the nude. John, Alan and Derryn, there’s always next year.

Gideon Haigh

In recent years, the most riveting history books have been produced by researchers toiling in Soviet archives, revealing the extent of Stalinism’s iniquities. Outstanding in 2004 were Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield (Penguin); Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot, by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov (John Murray); and Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Knopf). I also enjoyed The Man Who Tried to Buy the World by Jo Johnson and Martine Orange (Penguin), a cracking tale of the vainglorious French media magnate manqué Jean-Marie Messier. Among Australian books, I reread Mending the Mind (Sun Books), John Cade’s brief history of psychiatry, and marvelled again at its simple, unostentatious elegance.

Sonya Hartnett

In Fiona the Pig (Penguin), Leigh Hobbs proves yet again that the best artists have the whole world in their hands. This is a story about the love and acceptance that can be found within a family, and Hobbs’s wiry text and hysterical illustrations are woven around a softly charming message. The gulf of unknowability between parents and children is likewise a feature of Malcolm Knox’s A Private Man (Vintage), one of the year’s most original novels, exploring as it does two worlds (professional cricket and pornography) rarely visited by literary fiction. This artfully observed family drama feels broader in reach than do most Australian novels; there’s a worldly confidence behind its portrayal of a quietly suburban, private life. Peter Mews’s Bright Planet (Picador) is a blackly entertaining romp through Australia’s history that wasn’t an expedition in search of an inland sea is relentlessly stalked by the Grim Reaper. This fanciful, fantastic novel always kept me awake after turning off the light, wondering what dire things had been teasingly left out.

Clive James

After being fascinated and appalled by the key figure of Helen Gamer’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law (Picador), it was almost a relief not to meet the young lady in the end. Michael Blakemore’s Arguments with England: A Memoir (Faber) also has a questionable ending. We want to hear more about his career as a successful director on the international stage, although his preparatory years as a jobbing actor in English rep are evoked with a mastery of prose that is unfair on fulltime writers who don’t have beautiful actresses crying on their shoulders. Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (Viking) made me question whether Germaine Greer’s recommendation to join the Aborigines in their natural setting would really suit me. Goldsworthy’s hero makes the cultural transition to the point of having his penis converted into a banana split. This whitefella jumped up, but still read on to the end. A pleasure out of the common run was John Baxter’s A Pound of Paper (Doubleday), which establishes itself immediately as the most penetrating examination of the psychology of the rare-book nut.

Sylvia Lawson

These history books ask us to step aside while – radically, invaluably – they chum up the ground beneath our feet. Thank you Ross Gibson for Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (UQP); Mara Moustafine for Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files (Vintage); Rebe Taylor for Unearthed (Wakefield Press); and Barry Hill for his heroic Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Knopf), a great book about a greater one, Songs of Central Australia. It is 800 pages long, and I for one didn’t want it any shorter. And cheers to Jane Goodall for a knockout thriller, The Walker (Hodder Headline).

James Ley

The standout local novel for me was Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (Allen & Unwin), which (as James Bradley Pointed out in his ABR review in May 2004) makes interesting reading alongside Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (Viking) and Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (Allen & Unwin). Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights (Harvill) was further confirmation that she is one of the country’s most intelligent novelists; while John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (Vintage) was the eye-catching debut, with Larissa Behrendt’s Home (UQP) a worthy second. Further afield, David Foster Wallace’s new story collection Oblivion (Little, Brown) is his best book since Infinite Jest, Tobias Wolff’s Old School (Bloomsbury) was very likeable; and A.L. Kennedy’s Paradise (Jonathan Cape) is also excellent. Non–fiction honours go to James Wood’s essay collection The Irresponsible Self (Jonathan Cape) and Robert Dessaix’s meditation The Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (Picador) is also well worth a look. But the best book I read this year, the centenary of Bloomsday, was Ulysses, by James Joyce. It’s not bad at all.

Patrick McCaughey

Janine Burke’s The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (Knopf) deftly and triumphantly completes her ‘Heide tetralogy’, begun over twenty years ago with her pioneering life of Joy Hester. Even if Burke does not succeed in making the chatelaine of Heide likeable, she does make her explicable. Angus Trumble’s A Brief History of the Smile (Allen & Unwin) combines curious knowledge with sly insight, all written with an insouciance that disguise learning lightly. David Hansen’s John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque (TMAG/Art Exhibitions Australia), so handsomely produced, ranks among the best exhibition catalogues published in Australia, and provides the most comprehensive account to date of Australia’s first major painter.

David McCooey

Judith Beveridge, Wolf Notes (Giramondo): ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, the centrepiece of this extraordinary, prize-winning book, recreates Siddhartha’s years before becoming the Buddha. Profound but never ponderous, Wolf Notes is a brilliant study in balancing lyrical richness with astonishing clarity. J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (Knopf): Elizabeth Costello’s ambiguous lessons unsettle our ideas about such things as the representation of evil and the treatment of animals. This strange, passionately ironic book demonstrates how we are haunted by others, by ourselves and by the invisible worlds of history and pain. Luke Davies, Totem: Totem Poem plus 40 Love Poems (Allen & Unwin): Totem is an astounding work of love poetry. ‘Totem Poem’, an ecstatic poem of praise, leaves me gasping at what Davies can get away with, and at his originality, wit and ebullience. If Totem doesn’t get people reading poetry again, nothing will.

Brian McFarlane

In a rich year, it is hard to pull out three titles without a sense of reluctantly suppressing strong contenders. I mean, what about the irresistible, deceptively simple oeuvre of Alexander McCall Smith, for instance? However, three books that clamour for inclusion are as follows. J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (Knopf) is a work of formal daring: its eponym is on the celebrity lecture circuit, and Coetzee brilliantly characterises her through her lectures, even when, as her daughter-in-law nastily says, ‘She’s rambling’. Colm Tóibin, in The Master (Picador), takes some of the facts of Henry James’s life, and persuasively imagines the rest in an engrossing bio-novel. And Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers (Text) makes us think again about the writing of history, who does it, and the ensuing legacy of their perceptions and omissions.

Brenda Niall

A good year for memoirs, and for the ghosts they bring. Treading in the footsteps of Turgenev, Robert Dessaix looks at place, culture and creativity. Twilight of Love (Picador) is rich in ideas, meditative in tone. Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost (Fourth Estate) lets loose much justifiable rage at the authority figures of her childhood in the north of England, and their counterparts in the wider world. Ghosting, by Jennie Erdal (Canongate), explores the author’s bizarre relationship with her immensely powerful employer, a semi-literate London newspaper owner who uses her talent to buy himself some literary fame. As his ghost writer, creating two appallingly bad novels to his specifications, she risks her own sense of self. Brilliantly told, this comedy of confused identities comes in Erdal’s own voice. At least, I think it does.

Craig Sherborne

You know that with a Judith Beveridge poem you’ve got a great chance of reading a perfect set of words. It’s always a long time between drinks with Beveridge’s poetry books. Her first, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987), demonstrated what a deliciously descriptive eye she has. In her latest book. Wolf Notes (Giramondo), this top-shelf Australian poet also demonstrates a flair for oblique narrative. She can even make Eastern mysticism seem not so kitsch when used for the purposes of verse, and that’s saying something. Beveridge has won major awards for this collection – deservedly so. I reread J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (Vintage) twice this year; I may even give it a third going over before Christmas. First published in 1980, it has to be the greatest allegory for the ‘war on terror’ available on bookshelves anywhere. Who would have thought anyone could have topped the Cavafy poem that coined the condition all those decades ago? Waiting for the Barbarians syndrome is a scourge of human history – and, I dare say, always will be.

Sebastian Smee

Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (Picador) was the best novel I read this year. Ambitious, hilarious, finely constructed and full of verve, it was a deserving winner of the Booker Prize – in fact, the best Booker Prize – winner since J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (Vintage). John Updike’s The Early Stories 1953– 1975 (Knopf) was just as satisfying. These stories show Updike at his exhilarating best – better, even, than in the Rabbit novels. They arc, by turns, boyishly playful and dauntingly grownup. Finally, Jose Saramago’s The Double (Harvill) turned a well–tried literary conceit – the doppelgänger – into a bravura novel of great wit and slowly advancing menace.

John Tranter

As the editor of an Internet magazine (Jacket at http:// jackctmagazine.com), I spend most of my reading time on the Internet, where billions of texts await the unwary idler. Try these: The American Dissident rages against assimilated beatnik and hippy radicals, millionaire senators proclaiming themselves champions of the poor, teachers and professors frozen in pension frigidaires, media whores, and so forth: at www.geocitics.com/enmargc/. For the visually adventurous, Arras: New Media Poetry and Poetics is a clean, informative and stylish site, devoted to exploring how digital technology has enriched the practice of experimental poetics: at www.arras.net., Thank goodness someone’s doing it: The Apostrophe Protection Society (www.apostrophc.fsnei.co.uk/) will tell you how to punctuate a dog’s breakfast and how to spell the plural of CD.

Nicola Walker

Pornography, cricket, sex, love and Sydney – Malcolm Knox’s A Private Man (Vintage) covers all bases with a style that is gripping and apparently effortless. Particularly enjoyable is that he writes about Sydney with insight, wit and not a trace of apology. Helen Gamer sees no reason to apologise, either, for the partial approach of her remarkably instructive book of reportage, Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law (Picador). Gamer’s purposeful honesty makes her investigative journalism unassailable. In The Master (Picador), Colm Tóibin pays homage to Henry James with extraordinary delicacy and certainty, a feat that renders me speechless.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Having already passed judgement on Australian poetry, for my accumulated sins, I’ll name three works of prose. First will have to come J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (Knopf), in which a remarkable female character develops through ostensible lectures, and most powerfully. Then there is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night– Time (Jonathan Cape), by Mark Haddon, a page-turner hovering between detective story, children’s book and delicate study of autism. I must add Anna Funder’s tough Stasiland (Text), in which the author exposes herself to the bitter, varied afterworld of residual East Germany.

And the winners are ...

The judges of the 2004 ABR Reviewing Competition were gratified by the level of interest in this competition and by the overall standard of entries. We received almost 100 entries (a third of them from subscribers). Fiction and non-fiction were evenly divided; there were rather fewer children’s/young adult book reviews. To no one’s surprise, the most popular book was Helen Gamer’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law, followed by Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night. In the non-fiction category, the field was eclectic, from poetry to memoir to academic monograph. The judge had to hand it to Alan Whitehead of Blackheath NSW, who chose to review the 2005 Sydney and Blue Mountains Street Directory. Next time we look forward to his critique of the telephone directory.

The judges remarked on the closeness of many of the readings and on our reviewers’ preparedness to write frankly about their subjects’ strengths and weaknesses. There was much impatience with inattentive or non-existent editing. It wasn’t a timid field!

First prize in the fiction category goes to Maya Linden, who reviewed Sophie Cunningham’s Geography. Ms Linden recently completed her Master of Arts at the University of Melbourne, where she edited Vivid, the university’s creative arts journal. Ms Linden writes poetry and prose, and has also written and produced several independent short films.

Vivienne Kelly is the non-fiction winner. Ms Kelly, who reviewed Robert Dessaix’s Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev, tutored in English for some years at Monash University, where she also completed an MA. She is now working on a PhD ‘whose topic is broadly speaking, the intersection in Australia of history and myth’.

First prize in the children’s/young adult book category goes to Stephanie Owen Reeder, who reviewed Jeannie Baker’s Belonging. This is a model review, and shows what intelligence and empathy can be brought to a picture book in a review of 750 words. Dr Reeder has taught at secondary and tertiary levels. This year she completed a PhD in Communication at the University of Canberra. She is a seasoned reviewer, and has edited a number of books and journals. Currently, she is a full-time editor with Hansard.

The winning entries in each category will be published in the February 2005 issue. First- and second-placed entries will also appear on our website. As well as receiving $500 each, our overall winners will be commissioned to write another review in 2005. But we’re not stopping there. So impressed were we by a number of entrants (winners or not) that we have already begun to ask them to write for us – another benefit of this unique Australian competition.

Congratulations to our nine winners (all listed on page 27) and to everyone who entered. We look forward to presenting another Reviewing Competition in 2006.

2004 La Trobe University/ABR Annual Lecture

Is there a more beautiful room in Australia than the Mortlock Chamber at the State Library of South Australia? What a venue for this year’s La Trobe University/Australian Book Review Annual Lecture, which will be delivered by Peter Goldsworthy on Wednesday, December 8 (6 for a prompt 6.30 p.m. start). Dr Goldsworthy is well qualified to talk about ‘Famous Battles between Words and Music: From Monteverdi to Puff Daddy’, his theme on the night. Apart from his many award-winning novels and collections of poetry, essays and short stories, Dr Goldsworthy has written libretti for two operas by Richard Mills, most recently Batavia. He will be accompanied, on December 8, by Michael Morley, who will perform musical examples on the piano. The Mortlock Chamber may be grand, but space isn’t unlimited and tickets to the Annual Lecture are selling fast. We urge subscribers to book soon. As always, they receive a discount ($5, instead of the usual $15). Full details appear on page 20.

Vale Peter Mathers

Last month, Australia lost one of its most celebrated, if least prolific, satirists. ABR also lost a neighbour, for Peter Mathers lived nearby, close to the mighty Pelaco Building in Richmond. Born in England in 1931, Mathers was brought to Australia as an infant. His first novel, Trap (1966), won the Miles Franklin Award, a rare feat. In some ways, his second novel, The Wort Papers (1972), was even more celebrated. Mathers’s subsequent output was relatively small, and included a collection of short stories and several plays. Of his fiction, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1994) had this to say: ‘An ebulliently comic, innovative and inventive writer, Mathers is exceptional in his variety and range. He sees the writer’s role as one of preaching and practising subversion, holding up “authoritative” claims to ridicule and analysis ... His novels are deliberately negligent of novelistic rules, shaped not in orderly chronological form, but fluid, digressive and web-like.’

Belonging in Canberra

Fans of environmental artist and children’s author Jeannie Baker will want to drop in at the Canberra Museum and Gallery over summer. Artwork from Baker’s latest picture book Belonging will be on display from 11 December 2004 to 20 March 2005. Admirers will also have noted that Belonging is the book reviewed by the winner of the Reviewing Competition’s children’s/young adult books category.

Thanks to all

I want to thank my colleagues at ABR; our Chair, Robert Manne; board members and editorial advisers; our fantastic team of contributors; the many booksellers who support us; our advertisers – and especially our two major partners, La Trobe University (Chief Sponsor) and the National Library of Australia (our National Sponsor). Your support throughout 2004 has been greatly appreciated. Let’s not forget our volunteers, either. ABR benefits enormously from their generosity and goodwill. Finally, my best wishes to our readers in Australia and overseas. We look forward to offering you more new writing and analysis next year, starting in February. Ed.

Since a new book by Peter Porter is, though precious, also a complex phenomenon, one is stuck with the question of where to begin. The title poem, ‘Afterburner’, is perhaps as good a place as any. It is one of those poems (‘Clear Air Turbulence’ is another in this book) that speculates autobiographically and revisits youth looking for patterns and understandings:

I was being tipped backwards into the sawdust memories
of down-the-road, trying to set a sort of Scrapbook up –
my childhood, such a provincial world to be born into.

Still, I knew my real concern was ‘What is fuel
for understanding?’ Wordsworth had to be born somewhere
and so did Wittgenstein.

There are enough references here to give readers the clue that this is also a revisiting of an earlier poem, the marvellous ‘On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year’ from Porter’s 1970 collection, The Last of England. This poem, in turn, revisits Byron’s ‘This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’. There are, in other words, a lot of intertextual shenanigans going on, complicated by the fact that John Tranter (the dedicatee of ‘Afterburner’) produced a rewriting of ‘On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year’.

Michael Blakemore’s memoir begins with his departure from Sydney in 1950 to study acting at RADA in London, and ends with him on the threshold of his new career in 1965 as director of such major successes as A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and The National Health. An early enthusiast of Bertoli Brecht, Blakemore made his name directing plays by Peter Nichols. He quickly acquired a reputation for independence and originality, staging plays by Arthur Miller, David Hare, Peter Shaffer, Don DeLillo, David Mamet and seven premieres by Michael Frayn. He worked with his actors, seizing on accidents to build moments of spontaneous truth. This memoir describes his initial fifteen years in English repertory theatre.

Compared to Peter Finch, Leo McKern and Keith Michell, Blakemore, at twenty-one, was still a youngster when he left Australia. This was before Tyrone Guthrie’s report could affect the formation of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in the excitement following Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh’s Australian tour in 1948. Blakemore’s early grounding in theatre craft as an actor shaped his capacities as a director. He has been called an actors’ director in recognition of his great debt to repertory, but that’s only the half of it: he learned much from contact with giants such as Olivier and Guthrie.

Sherryl Clark

Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants (Scholastic), by Louise Rennison. With all the serious young adult books around everyone needs a dose of Georgia Nicolson’s confessions. Between the Sex God, the troublesome cat and life at school, Georgia’s diary is full of deep meaningosity – not! Life on a small farm in 1906 is beautifully portrayed in Jennifer Donnelly’s A Gathering Light (Bloomsbury). Mattie longs to be a writer, but it seems impossible when her father won’t even let her work at the Glenmore Hotel over summer. Everyone wants Mattie to do things their way and the strength of the story lies in her quiet persistence and honesty. Historical description creates a believable world without ‘teaching’. Dragonkeeper (black dog books), by Carole Wilkinson, deservedly won a CBC Award this year. Ping’s travels with a dragon follow the idea of the quest, but the setting and detail bring ancient China to life for readers of all ages.

Chester Wilmot was killed when the Comet airliner he was flying to London crashed near Rome on 10 January 1954. The ABC and BBC radio journalist had survived six dangerous years as a war correspondent in World War II only to fall victim to an aircraft design fault. Wilmot’s untimely death was also a great loss for Australian history, as he had recently been commissioned to write the volume of the Australian official history on the vital North African battles of Tobruk and Alamein. His best-selling Tobruk 1941: Capture, Siege, Relief (1944) and The Struggle for Europe (1952) indicate that he would have written a history that was authoritative, incisive and enthralling. Neil McDonald suggests in this new book that Wilmot would also have had quite a bit to say about the senior wartime Australian army commander, General Thomas Blamey.

This year for the third year in a row, Black Inc. is reprinting writing from HEAT in one of its ‘Best Australian’ anthologies, without seeking my permission as the magazine’s editor and publisher. They can do this because there is a legal loophole in Australia’s literary culture – literary magazines in this country do not normally have contracts with their authors. It is conventional to ask magazine editors for their permission before reprinting work that has appeared in their pages; but the fact is, if the author’s permission can be won it is entirely irrelevant, from a legal point of view what the magazine editor thinks.

There are practical reasons why literary magazines do not normally place their authors under contract. With the limited resources available, the additional administrative burden of handling contracts with up to 100 authors a year is not a prospect an editor willingly entertains. But there is a more important reason why this part of the literary world has remained open and unregulated. The relationship between magazine editor and writer is one based on trust, loyalty and a commitment to shared intellectual or aesthetic ideals. It is not primarily a commercial relationship.

Camel Rider is, according to the Penguin press release, the story of a young American boy living in the Middle East. When war breaks out, the release goes on, the boy is left behind as his family flees to safety. He befriends a young Arab boy, who has been kidnapped and taken to the desert as a camel jockey. Actually, no. Camel Rider is the story of a young Australian boy, Adam, living in the Middle East. When the city is invaded, his family does not flee. His father, a pilot, is away on a four-day trip (with Adam’s passport tucked unknowingly in his flight bag); his mother is on her way to Melbourne alone simply because, without a passport, Adam is unable to travel with her. In the desert, Adam meets a young Bangladeshi boy, who has not been kidnapped but rather sold to slave traders. Should it matter that a press release has it so wrong? I think it does.

Fortunately Camel Rider, the novel, is a much better read than its press release. Set in the fictitious city of Abudai in the Arabian Gulf, the adventure begins when twelve-year­ old Adam leaves the safety of a convoy heading to the border and sets off into the desert, determined to make his way home to rescue the dog he was forced to leave behind during the evacuation. Lost and dazed, he meets Walid, who has been left for dead in the desert by his cruel, but wonderfully named, masters Old Goat and Breath of Dog.

Aspiring Australian writers lament the fact that few publishers are accepting unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Those that do accept them lament the fact that they are inundated by around a thousand submissions each year. What’s the solution? Increasingly, it seems, awards for unpublished work with publication as the prize. Writers know their work will at least be looked at; publishers can outsource to judges the culling of what would otherwise be their slush pile. It is no longer just the 24-year-old Vogel Award, with its promise of publication by Allen & Unwin. State-based awards now guarantee publication by UQP, FACP and Wakefield Press.

Both of these new novels bear the weight of expectation that attaches to winning such an award: Drown Them in the Sea was one of two winners of the 2003 The Australian / Vogel Literary Award; Jillian Watkinson’s The Hanging Tree follows her first novel, The Architect (2000), which won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2002 for the best manuscript by an emerging Queensland writer.

‘Since the end of the Cold War, foreign policy has become economic policy.’ It was March 1999 when I put this cliché du jour to a British bureaucrat handling policy about cultural industries and trade agreements. The World Trade Organisation was young, the New Economy was everywhere, the NASDAQ still had 3000 points to rise. But we were walking across Trafalgar Square, Nelson was watching and I should have known better. ‘That,’ she said tolerantly, ‘is what they told us in 1948.’ As we spoke, NATO forces were at war. Bill Clinton, who had won the first US election since the Cold War by reminding his predecessor about the economy, had decided that force was now required in the Balkans. He’d already apologised for not using it in Rwanda. Two-and-a-half years later, the mutual defence provisions of Australia’s military alliance with the US would be activated for the first time. The Cold War was over, but there would be plenty for diplomats to talk about besides trade deals and prosperity. Later in 1999, the collapse of the Seattle ministerial meeting of the WTO showed that even economic policy was going to be hard work.

Fatal Attraction is an inquiry into Australian foreign policy, particularly the American alliance. How to Kill a Country investigates the new economic arm of that alliance, the free trade agreement finalised earlier this year. Together, the books tell a story of the transformation of strategic and trade policy in Australia and the US since the late 1990s. Foreign policy and force are back, with economic policy a wholly owned subsidiary.

Gardening is as old as the British settlement of Australia, but its popularity among the expanding middle classes has blossomed throughout the continent over the last forty years. The annual guide published by Australia’s Open Garden Scheme with the ABC, and Louise Earwaker and Neil Robertson’s The Open Garden (2000), attest to the variety of gardening styles practised today.

Garden history, however, is a new discipline. Its practitioners, in contrast to the mass of amateur gardeners, are a select, professional group: in the main architects, historians or heritage officials. They form part of the Australian clerisy, Coleridge’s term which deserves to be more widely employed. The Australian Garden History Society (founded in 1980) joined with Oxford University Press to publish The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (2002), a pioneering work that presents readers with a summary of research work in progress on all aspects of gardening in Australia.

Peter Rodgers, Australia’s Ambassador to Israel from 1994-97, has produced a flimsy and flawed anti-Zionist tract that tells the reader much about his mindset but does not provide anything approaching a reliable historical or contemporary guide to Middle Eastern realities. Rodgers maintains a veneer of even-handedness, but his underlying point appears anything but balanced. Israel, apparently, was born in sin through dispossessing another people. Herzl’s ‘Zionist dream came at terrible cost to both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples’, according to Rodgers, who is now firmly rooted in the ideological terrain of those diplomats and journalists who believe that Israel deserves all the pain it is suffering. Herzl’s Nightmare is nothing more than a skewed anti-Israel diatribe that builds its case by means of a selective presentation of some facts.

Martha Nussbaum is a distinguished contemporary philosopher who has written in exemplary fashion on ancient philosophy and philosophy of literature; she has also produced important work in social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind and feminist thought. This book on emotions, law and the idea of a liberal society shows some of the strain of that industry: it is prolix and a little uneven. But it also has the characteristics of her best work: sparkling clarity, high learning, intellectual vigour and something to say. The scope, the confidence – the grasp of it all – astonishes.

Nussbaum’s chief purpose here is to essay the psychological foundations of political liberalism, a purpose she realises indirectly, in the main, by criticising anti-liberal positions on the relations between emotions, law and polity. Some recent debate on these relations has focused on the role of disgust and shame in criminal law, and these debates are at the centre of the book; but since disgust and shame are complex emotions and have many kin – indignation, anger, guilt etc. – which also trench upon the law, and since the character of a society is deeply defined by its laws, Nussbaum has to work a very large canvas indeed.

If the world is divided between those who celebrate their birthday in a flamboyant manner and those who don’t, then John Marsden unquestionably belongs in the first camp. At least, he did before his much-publicised fall from public grace. Marsden begins his autobiography with a detailed account of his fiftieth birthday. A full year earlier, he began mailing monthly teaser invitations to his guests. The first read, in capitals: ‘An important invitation. You have been invited to one of the most important events of 1992.’ Each month, more information dribbled out, until the day itself, when a ‘rich smattering of state cabinet ministers; Liberal, Labor and Democrat politicians; lawyers, judges, civic leaders and business heavyweights all made the sunset pilgrimage to a hillside on the edge of town along a darkened stretch of the road.’ The reader gets the message: this birthday boy was one hell of a mover and shaker, a player, a friend of the rich and powerful, and, as the Grange Hermitage flowed freely, one damn fine host; a man at the height of his powers.

Eleven years and 400 pages later, Marsden is a broken man, fighting depression and cancer, deserted by many of his influential acquaintances, his finances depleted, lonely and love-lorn, his reputation barely intact after a bruising and protracted defamation case against Channel Seven. How did it come to this?

An unfamiliar character from a strange land is barred from setting foot on mainland Australia. Desperate to land, he leaps from ship to shore, breaking his right leg in the process. A conservative attorney-general desperate to protect our borders, pursues this man, now on crutches, through the courts. The charismatic stranger wins his court case and holds the government up to ridicule. Shadowed unrelentingly by Canberra’s spooks, he urges Australians to look past their government’s pronouncements and discover for themselves the real dangers to world peace. Whilst history, even in Marx’s cycles of tragedy and farce, never neatly repeats itself, these duels between Egon Kisch, Czech communist, and Robert Menzies, Anglophile attorney-general, do have contemporary import. No doubt this explains why Kisch’s adventures in 1930s Australia have been told several times through film, theatre and books. In this new and enjoyable recasting of the drama, Heidi Zogbaum reminds us of the bare bones of Kisch’s Australian sojourn, focusing for the most part on his successful courtroom battles and European background. These are interspersed with detailed summaries from spies such as ‘Snuffbox’, charged with dredging up the evidence on Kisch’s European activities that led to his eventual deportation.

These two quite different historical novels, both by first-time novelists, reveal once again the many difficulties of that genre, no matter how much information the author has gathered. The publisher of Temple of the Grail has provided ample publicity material. Along with the usual media release, there is a two-page puff piece couched in the first person about how Adriana Koulias came to write and publish the book. Koulias is Brazilian by birth, from a Catholic family that moved to Australia when she was nine: ‘By the time I was eighteen I had come into contact with a cornucopia of religion and philosophy.’ Much of this lore has been fed into Temple of the Grail, which sets out, she says, ‘to show how religious zeal, carried to extremes, eventually leads to error’. In addition to this promotional material, the book itself contains a foreword by David Wansbrough praising the book to the skies:

None of this book has the waffly lofty twaddle of ‘channelled’ information. The content has been produced because the author has worked hard to clarify her thoughts, to absorb historical references, to totally live for a time within the activity of the experience – and then has let it go. The pictures that arose later have a truth about them.

What is the point of including a foreword such as this? If one is reading it, the book has probably already been bought. If what Wansbrough says is true, it will become apparent to the reader. If not, it makes the failure all the more glaring.

Who’s who

Dear Editor,

Henry Ergas’s disingenuous response (ABR, November 2004) to my review (ABR, October 2004) of Peter Saunders’s Australia’s Welfare Habit and How to Kick It deserves a reply. Ergas poses as a dissatisfied ‘customer-reader’ of ABR. From this position, he expresses outrage at my review of Saunders’s book. Come off it, Henry!

It is sobering to read these two optimistic works about a man of promise, written in mid-2004, in the light of their subject’s defeat in October 2004. Neither author was convinced that Latham could win. Barry Donovan has too much experience of the vagaries of the electorate to be anything but cautious, though he concludes with the hope that ‘the Lodge may yet have a prime minister’s young kids bouncing around in it before Christmas’. Through Margaret Simons’s essay runs an undercurrent of doubt about such a possibility, and she identifies Latham’s Achilles heel: ‘For decades, voters have been told that the main job of politicians is to manage the economy ... [and] I doubt if Latham will be able to convince them that it is now acceptable to vote on the basis of social issues, and the concrete things that directly affect their lives.’

These are two very different approaches to Latham. Donovan’s Mark Latham is a quickie biography – ‘Mark Latham, old Oils fan, new Labor leader, circuit-breaker extraordinaire’ – which, at its best, is informed by Donovan’s own intimate experience of high politics, an experience which enables him to secure a series of high-profile interviews, above all with Latham himself. Simons’s Latham’s World, in the excellent Quarterly Essay series, ‘is not biography ... [but rather an essay on] what the Latham phenomenon means’. She did not get an interview with the Labor leader, and this rankles throughout. She had, instead, to attend one of his community meetings, and produces a memorable physical description of the Labor leader as ‘big, boofy even when well-groomed – like a version of Ginger Meggs grown up and gone into politics’. As this suggests, her work is more detached and critical than Donovan’s, but, surprisingly, it is also more authoritative on those biographical issues they both deal with.

Manning Clark married Dymphna Lodewycks in 1939. In the following years they lived in Oxford, Tiverton, Geelong and Melbourne, before moving to Canberra in 1949. On 29 October 1953 they took up residence in a new house, designed by their friend Robin Boyd, in Tasmania Circle, Forrest. It was to be their home for the rest of their lives. It was not a particularly large house, and the Clarks and their six children must have found it cramped at times. The only upstairs room was Manning’s study, reached by a ladder from the entrance hall. It was in this room, with its view of Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain, that he wrote the six volumes of A History of Australia, several other books, and countless articles, reviews, lectures and speeches.

Those attending art history conferences over the last few years have been beguiled by the papers given to Catherin Speck, based on her research into aspects of Australian women artists and war. Each paper has detailed newly uncovered artists, works and information, and whetted the appetite for Painting Ghosts: Australian Women Artists in Wartime: not a reproduction of Speck’s previous work but fresh information, artists and images (such as Adelaide painter Marjorie Gwynne) placed into better-known depictions of war by artists such as Hilda Rix Nicholas and Nora Heysen.

Speck takes her title, Painting Ghosts, from a statement by Stella Bowen, who was employed to paint portraits of Australian aircraft crews during World War II. When many of her subjects, including those of her best-known work of the series, Bomber crew ( 1944), were killed, often before she had finished the paintings, Bowen commented that it was ‘like painting ghosts’. Before reading this explanation, I had supposed the book’s title referred to the artists themselves: ‘painting ghosts’ sprinted out of an art history and memory. Indeed, Speck’s book resurrects these ghosts: little-known or unknown women artists who expressed their feelings and observations about war; and little-known works concerning war by better-known artists such as Grace Cossington Smith and Margaret Preston.

The statues in the ancient museum
The ones of young women, the kohl
Dripping tears of the centuries from
Their luminous eyes, smiling that
Detached ironic smile never doleful,
That’s what gave her a gift for it.

Of these three début novels, John Honey’s Paint is by far the richest: the only one that has the feel of a world turning as its pages ever more rapidly must be turned. Honey has created characters that matter to the reader and offers a truly immersive reading experience.

Laying it on thick is a vivid theme in the novel, whether what’s being laid on is paint, food, wine, drama, passion or bullshit. The central character, Kevin Goodenough (otherwise known as Boris), is a painter and a Vietnam veteran who lives in a self­-built house and studio in the bush outside Hobart. He paints in vivid, frantic spurts, and the paintings now driving these spurts, a series of war paintings, are the best he has ever done. Boris is depicted as a brilliant painter with no head for business, an artist who cares less about the future of a completed work than about getting a work of art onto canvas. Enter Ferret Wherret, a dealer so unscrupulous that to say much more would infringe on the thrill of reading just what Ferret has pulled off this time, and with whom.

Since the publication of the inaugural Best Australian Essays in 1998, Black Inc.’s ‘Best’ series has grown into an impressive franchise that now takes in the Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Poems and Best Australian Sportswriting. That, until this year, the essays, stories and regular Quarterly Essay should all have had a single editor, Peter Craven, seems in retrospect quite extraordinary. It was perhaps inevitable that such an empire would eventually fragment – evolving, say, into a rotating series of guest editorships under Craven’s direction. But his departure from Black Inc. early this year, after a disagreement with publisher Morry Schwartz over the future of the Quarterly Essay series, came as a shock to followers of this series.

The Craven empire was big, robust and energetic. Yes, the collections, with their growing page numbers, sometimes seemed so overstuffed you almost expected them to burp; yes, Best Australian Essays was sometimes so devoted to the topical issues of the day that I have heard myself grizzling that it ought perhaps to be renamed Best Australian Feature Writing. But with this rampant acquisitiveness came a sense of urgency and intervention that turned each issue into a literary event. Craven’s generous sense of mission as a critic, setting himself the task of assessing and rethinking the genres under his care, was no doubt part of the series’ growing impact. In his editorials, Craven was not afraid to pronounce – sometimes with a healthy dash of bombast – on the state of the nation and the state of the art.

The Art of War is published ‘to accompany the television series’ produced by Film Australia and to be broadcast on SBS. The television spin-off is an attractive genre for an art book. Writers have to keep to the point. There is a conventional picture-book formula, comprising a potted artist’s biography, a bit of art-historical placement and sometimes too little about what is specific to the work. Lola Wilkins’s Artists in Action: From the Collection of the Australian War Memorial (2003) is a good example. But a television producer knows that the words must concentrate upon the works we are staring at: forget the biography and the art history; just look at the art. Betty Churcher, like Sister Wendy, is very good at looking at works of art. For vivid specificity, take Colin Colahan’s striking Ballet of wind and rain (1945), men suddenly glimpsed leaning into the midwinter elements on a recently liberated airfield. Churcher suggests that it was so titled ‘perhaps because he has danced his brush across the canvas to simulate wild gusts but more likely because the four RAAF airmen duck their heads in unison like the cygnets in the dance from Swan Lake’.

Four chapters presumably reflect the four-part series: World War I; its aftermath and World War II; ‘Far from the Front Line’, which is prison camps, hospitals, support bases and the home front; and ‘Cold War and Conflagrations’, which is Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, East Timor and Afghanistan.

Publishers and the publics they serve seem enthralled by the idea of ‘the best’. The best of what is ultimately less important than the superlative itself, which implies a rigorous screening process to isolate the most worthy material. Never mind that magazine and book publishers have already put writing through a brutal screening process with acceptance rates from .01 to 1 per cent. For readers whose schedules or temperaments prohibit them from doing the work themselves, a collection of ‘The Best’ can be useful and appealing.

In the US, the appeal is clear, as The Best American Poetry series released its seventeenth volume in September. The series has its own editor, David Lehman, who annually selects a guest editor for the volume (guest editors have recently included Lyn Hejinian, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Creeley and Rita Dove – a relatively wide range aesthetically, but not professionally, as all the guest editors have already achieved poetic fame). Each edition of The Best American Poetry includes seventy-five poems from magazines as well as explanatory and biographical notes from the seventy-five poets.

Gay Bilson, in her Plenty: Digressions on Food, is good on garnish. She describes the occasion of the queen mother’s tour of this country in 1958, during which the royal visitor ‘was offered white-bread sandwiches in the shape of Australia, with a sprig of parsley at the south-eastern tip, thoughtfully representing Tasmania’. Bilson understands, wisely, that the anecdote speaks for itself, and requires not further garnishing from her. Instead she reflects on the strange resilience of the parsley sprig, and the way it keep turning up on plates, decade after decade, as a signal to the diner that the dish had been composed by someone with an interest on how it looked on the plate; that somebody in the kitchen was taking the trouble, even if only to the extent of adding the sprig of parsley that had been sitting patiently in chilled water, waiting for its big moment.

‘Some of the ideas for this book were first tried out,’ writes its editor, David Carter, during the 2001 conference of the European Association for Studies of Australia at Lecce, in southern Italy. Displaying interest in Australia as a way to get one’s fare paid to leave the country is not the only reason why this bain-marie of a book has not found a reason to exist.

Salted through the collection is an identification of intellectuals with those academics who promoted the category of ‘public intellectual’ to justify their existence in the ideas market. They soon found that many of the most prominent commentators were right-wingers, often funded by thinktanks independent of tax revenues, but not of corporate strings. To defend corporations against damages for past crimes – notably the occupation of traditional lands – history has been added to the disciplines accepting bids in the ideas market. Carter charges Keith Windschuttle and his ilk with having ‘turned themselves into historians’. Why is it forgivable for a ‘clerk’ to get quotations and footnotes wrong but unspeakable for the laity to point out those failings? The fact-grubbers who cheered on Windschuttle’s abuse of the postmodernists and deconstructionists in The Killing of History (1994) are miffed because he has turned his empiricist/positivist definition of ‘the truth’ against their mates.

While you read this review, someone somewhere in the world is organising his or her calendar for the next few years to make sure that it will include at least one performance of The Ring. Special flights, advance tickets, holidays and sabbaticals will be juggled with, and ‘The Festival Play of Three Days with a Preliminary Evening’ will be tracked down and added to a pilgrim’s relentless progress. The opportunities are widespread temporally and geographically. Bayreuth manages a new or an adapted production each year, and opera houses and festival sites round the world have become devoted to mounting Ring productions – some at colossal cost and others of ingenious improvisation. Cologne and Adelaide are merely the latest to come to mind, within a month or two of each other this year. Der Ring des Nibelungen has at last become the World Drama that Richard Wagner planned; however its box-office success is taking its composer’s real intention ever further from realisation.

Janina Milek – born in Poland in 1921, shunted out of it with her parents and siblings by the Russians to become human draught horses in Siberia in 1940, released via Uzbekistan to a refugee camp in Iran in 1942, transferred to another refugee camp in Lusaka in Africa in 1943, and shipped to Australia in 1950 – told Tim Chappell that her family was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. When she finally had some kind of say as to where she might live (an Australian commission offered places to healthy persons from the African camp), the one thing she knew was that she would not go back to Poland and live ‘on the back of an old woman’s tongue’ (Janina’s marvellous phrase for gossip mongering). Her mother, to whom Janina had been completely devoted, suddenly announced that she wanted only to return home. Janina was deserted by the one person she now lived to care for.

It wasn’t only the gossip that Janina Milek was avoiding (she was unmarried and determined to stay so), but the church, the class system and communism. These reasons make her seem like a political animal, but all she wanted was freedom and a house of her own. Decades after being welcomed to Western Australia by a group of women who handed her a posy of flowers, a bag of lollies and a cup of tea, she finally buys a small house. On arrival, one of her two small cases held only the large aluminium dish she had been given in Pahlavi. Earlier, in Teheran, rough blankets, grey and beautiful, had been distributed. This was Janina’s Persian blanket.

Liz Conor’s accomplished history of the ‘modern appearing woman’ in 1920s Australia has much to recommend it. The archival work that it represents is fascinating and suggestive of a trove of female energy, sadness and invention. Hilarious and ambivalent stories emerge of Sydney ‘gals’ and Business Girls, of a New York flapper with traffic lights painted on her silk stockings, and of Amelia, an indigenous maidservant, who invented grunge without her mistress recognising style when it stepped up to her table in a red skirt, man’s striped shirt and big boots. These and other stories trace the vigour of young women’s determination to respond to the consumer possibilities of a spectacular new world of media images, electric light and postwar male uncertainties.

We read for pleasure; perhaps this way we find out more about ourselves. Pleasure comes first, a fact that is often lost when a book is overanalysed, always a danger when questions follow a pattern of interpretation designed to trace a line around a response. Picture books are particularly vulnerable, as their words are few and they are becoming more sophisticated, drawing on traditional, modern and symbolic art. Whether a child will find delight would be my first criterion for the purchase of a picture book. It doesn’t have to be all sweetness and light: a shiver of fear may be just as engrossing as laughter.

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, the idea of ‘culture’ was radically democratised. The meaning of the word shifted away from the old, exclusive definition – culture as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, as Matthew Arnold put it in 1869 – and became a more inclusive concept that took in popular forms. We have become used to the idea that there is no clear dividing line between high and low. There is something liberating about having the freedom to treat popular cultural forms as the objects of serious attention. Even Meanjin, the most venerable and literary of these three journals, can publish an essay – an interesting. well-written and intelligent essay – on a pair of television soaps without it seeming out of place alongside more traditional subjects. But while some barriers fall, others go up. Cultural studies, as the academic discipline that has sprung up to exploit this relatively new freedom, faces the question of whether it should direct itself toward a general, non-academic audience or police the distinction between ‘serious’ academic writing and the kind of analysis that might be found in the mainstream media.

Near a little beach at Northbridge, in the heart of Sydney’s northern suburbs, the vertical rock face carries the image of a whale, about life-size, created by the original inhabitants at some indeterminate date. ‘[B]ecause of its precipitous location,’ says Gavin Souter, ‘one cannot stand far enough away to take it in all at once. Head, fins, flukes and flippers have to be viewed separately, then put together.’

It’s a bit the same with Souter’s book. Times & Tides is a rambling piece of work, which the reader’s imagination must somehow draw together. It was said of John Dunmore Lang’s Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales (1834) that it was really ‘The History of Dr Lang, to which is added the History of New South Wales’. Sometimes Times & Tides feels a bit like that. It’s a book about a marriage – Souter’s long and happy marriage with Middle Harbour, as told by the more articulate partner.

Tobsha Learner, the author of three books, is best known for her collection of sexy short stories Quiver (1997), which is not to be confused with Nikki Gemmell’s Shiver (1997). Learner’s latest effort is also a compilation of sexually charged tales. Tremble, however, is more ambitious than her previous offering. Instead of assembling all her characters in one city (Sydney) and in a contemporary setting to perform naked gymnastics with one another, Learner scatters her new cast all over the globe and within various time frames. From somewhere off the Cape of Trafalgar in the early nineteenth century to a stuffy British museum in 1851, from the dustbowl of Oklahoma to a tiny Greek island, Learner’s lusty protagonists gasp and moan their way throughout the night.

Under a Medlar Tree is Syd Harrex’s fifth slim collection since his first, Atlantis, came out twenty years ago. With connections to both Tasmania and South Australia, Harrex has travelled widely and appears to be one of those poets who has made that Faustian bargain with academia where Mephistopheles says: ‘I will deliver you much material (but not the time to use it).’ Such a trade-off seems to ensure that its signatory will be an occasional poet, a poet of travel pieces, of dedications and elegies, of small moments saved and treasured between bouts of academic writing. As befits a man under such pressures, much of Harrex’s poetry has been about love and death. With Under a Medlar Tree, this is even more the case.

Tasmania is a wild place, the home of the last great temperate rainforests on the planet. Somewhere in those forests, or perhaps in the sclerophyll scrublands of the north-cast, may still be lurking a thylacine, the famed Tasmanian tiger. Over the years, there has been no end of searching, so far with no result. Despite numerous reported sightings, all we know for certain is that the last one ever sighted, a female, died on 7 September 1936 in miserable captivity in Hobart Zoo.

The mythology surrounding the tiger and the inability to close the chapter on Australia’s most famous near-extinct animal with a definite conclusion provides the background for John Dale’s absorbing tale of his search for the truth about the events that led to his own grandfather’s violent death.

Belinda Alexandra’s first novel, The White Gardenia (2002), was a ‘word of mouth best seller’. It may not have been picked up by certain critics, but it was nevertheless favoured by the book-buying public. Its subject was exotic – the fortunes of the daughter of a White Russian refugee family in Harbin and Shanghai – but the Mills & Boon cover was a bit of a worry. Now Wild Lavender appears, the second instalment of Alexandra’s two-book contract.

For some long-forgotten and surely misplaced medical reason, I was forced as a child to take spoonfuls of vile white poison called Hypol. It may have had some sinister connection with cod-liver oil – I no longer know or care. I mention this arcane information because Robert Macklin’s memoir War Babies, is the first example know to me of Hypol’s appearance in a literary work. I don’t recall anyone else mentioning ‘the Rawleigh’s man’ from whom my mother, not liking to send this hawker away without a sale of any kind, would buy jelly crystals.

The first half of War Babies is full of details resonant to me and, I suspect, to many other readers of a certain age. It’s not just the trade names, but slang terms and clichés, moments of childish awe at the strangeness and excitement of life, all seen through the eyes of the very youthful protagonist. Robbie, who will later, as a jackaroo, metamorphose into ‘Bob’. There’s the Silent Knight refrigerator (ours was very unreliable, as I recall, and given to puffing out fumes that darkened the kitchen ceiling); there are girls who ‘get the giggles’; there is a non-churchgoer who claims descent from ‘a long line of Calathumpians’; there is a ‘sook’, a ‘spine-basher’. a ‘confirmed bachelor’ and lots of ‘Aunties and Uncles’; boys come ‘busters’ off bikes: and father goes to ‘the rubbidy’.

The internet, like its big sister, the electronic computer, is a Little Frankenstein of the Cold War – one of the countless bright ideas brought shuddering to life with the financial backing of the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the feverish aftermath of the launching of Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, by the Soviet Union in 1957. And why did the US military finance the research and development of a medium that would, thirty years down the track, turn the Amazon into a cheap place to buy books and forever pervert the meaning of a humble can of Spam? In a word: Armageddon.

It was hoped the Internet would provide an alternative means of communication, should the Soviets and the US actually have that Dr Strangelove moment. After all, if the Russians could send Sputnik into orbit, what else were they capable of? With that in mind, in 1965 the TX-2 computer in Massachusetts was connected to the Q-32 computer in California via a phone line, creating the world’s first wide-area computer network. The event was more of a dial tone than a big bang, but a landmark nonetheless – the Internet had been conceived. Cold War. Space race. Arms race. As the tale of its creation demonstrates, the Internet is a remarkable medium with a story to tell. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia.

Years before I had set foot in Italy, Masaccio’s frescoes, even in flat reproduction, opened a bright chink into a time and place not my own. There were the indelible faces, the bustle, colour, the human jousting – life so vivid, foreign and shockingly familiar. Vintage is the literary harvest of ten years of a writers’ festival in Mildura. If, like me, you have never been, this is your Masaccio ticket of entry into a decade of conversations, poems, stories, essays, recipes, letters, music and song. Vintage could be a ragbag, but it isn’t. It could be a self-congratulatory riff, but it isn’t, because the writing is of such quality and because the presiding figure of Stefano de Pieri gives the volume coherence and verve.