Hesba Brinsmead, Pastures of the Blue Crane (Oxford): Another first novel and another Book of the Year winner, and again better than anything else since attempted by its author. It too is con­cerned with a girl’s discovery of the truth about her origins. The story is set around Murwillumbah and the surf beach at Coolangatta and has a lot to say about racial prejudice as it affects the Kanaka descendants. Beat of the City (Oxford) might also be of appeal to this age group.

Lee Harding, Displaced Person (Penguin): There is plenty of dark suspense and sombre mood in this modern fan­tasy of a St. Kilda youth who finds himself gradually being cut off from physical contact with real society. The Australian urban setting and air of mysticism are likely to appeal strongly to today’s teenage readers.

Elisabeth MacIntyre, It Looks Different When You Get There (Hodder): A pregnant girl drops out of University to have her baby and flees to Sydney to hide the fact from her West Australian parents. The book then describes her struggle for existence and independence during the child’s first two years. It is something like Caddie although the quite different life-styles she experiences (including sharing a house with a quite bitchy ‘feminist’ extended-family in Sydney and working on a commune in Queensland) make it the more interesting and ‘relevant’ book. It is so well written and has such a ring of truth and conviction about it that it leaves most of its American counterparts for dead. It could sell in thousands to the mid-teens if published as a paperback and marketed for them.

Eleanor Spence, A Candle for Saint Antony (Oxford): This is a successful attempt at a pretty daring idea – to describe a close emotional relationship between two adolescent boys. One is a brash, boorish middle-class ocker, all Paul Hogan and loud-mouthed machismo. The other he describes as a ‘bloody little ethnic tyke’ who suddenly turns up at his trendy independent school. This boy is his opposite in almost every way, being sober, sensitive, cultured and Austrian. Neither boy really understands the strong and growing attraction between them, but a confrontation at the book’s climax predictably leaves both of them older and wiser. There is necessarily a degree of stage drama contrivance in this book and the devastatingly accurate depiction of teenage behaviour makes it as much a book about adolescents as it is for them. Eleanor Spence is a shrewd and sardonic observer of our middle class culture and writes with admirable directness and wit. This novel has already struck a responsive chord for many readers.

Patricia Wrightson. This author’s latest novels The Ice is Coming and The Dark Bright Water (Hutchinson) are her most difficult, being serious attempts to incorporate Aboriginal experience, using creatures and spirits from their folklore, into traditional novel form. They repay careful study. The Dark Bright Water has a good deal of what I take to be sexual tension about it, but it is unlikely that either book will ever become ‘really popular’ They do, however, mark a high peak in Australian creativity in this genre.